Top 500 Joseph Campbell Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “The object becomes aesthetically significant when it becomes metaphysically significant.”

— Joseph Campbell

102. “What the artist must render is a living moment somehow, a living moment actually in action or an inward experience.”

— Joseph Campbell

103. “All the old bindings are broken. Cosmological centers now are anywhere and everywhere. The earth is a heavenly body, most beautiful of all, and all poetry is now archaic that fails to match the wonder of this view.”

— Joseph Campbell

104. “You know the rule: If you are falling, dive. Do the thing that has to be done.”

— Joseph Campbell

105. “When we quit thinking primarily about ourselves and our own self-preservation, we undergo a truly heroic transformation of consciousness.”

— Joseph Campbell

106. “We’re not on our journey to save the world but to save ourselves. But in doing that you save the world. The influence of a vital person vitalizes.”

— Joseph Campbell

107. “Sin always finds it’s root in our own selfish desires and self-gratification.”

— Joseph Campbell

108. “The function of the society is to cultivate the individual. It is not the function of the individual to support society.”

— Joseph Campbell

109. “If you live with the myths in your mind, you will find yourself always in mythological situations. They cover everything that can happen to you. And that enables you to interpret the myth in relation to life, as well as life in relation to myth.”

— Joseph Campbell

110. “Love is perfect kindness.”

— Joseph Campbell

111. “What you have to do, you do with play. The universe is God’s play.”

— Joseph Campbell

112. “We keep thinking of deity as a kind of fact, somewhere; God as a fact. God is simply our own notion of something that is symbolic of transcendence and mystery. The mystery is what’s important.”

— Joseph Campbell

113. “The best things cannot be told because they transcend thought. The second best are misunderstood because they are the thoughts that are supposed to refer to that which cannot be thought about. The third best are what we talk about.”

— Joseph Campbell

114. “If you want to change the world, you have to change the metaphor.”

— Joseph Campbell

115. “What will they think of me? Must be put aside for bliss.”

— Joseph Campbell

116. “If you’re going to have a story, have a big story, or none at all.”

— Joseph Campbell

117. “Instead of clearing his own heart the zealot tries to clear the world.”

— Joseph Campbell

118. “Wherever the poetry of myth is interpreted as biography, history, or science, it is killed.”

— Joseph Campbell

119. “Marriage is not a simple love affair, it’s an ordeal, and the ordeal is the sacrifice of ego to a relationship in which two have become one.”

— Joseph Campbell

120. “I should have said, ‘Follow your blisters.’”

— Joseph Campbell

121. “You must have a room, or a certain hour or so a day, where you don’t know what was in the newspapers that morning a place where you can simply experience and bring forth what you are and what you might be.”

— Joseph Campbell

122. “Where you stumble and fall, there you will find gold.”

— Joseph Campbell

123. “The seat of the soul is where the inner world and the outer world meet.”

— Joseph Campbell

124. “The best we can do is lean towards the light.”

— Joseph Campbell

125. “Wisdom and foolishness are practically the same. Both are indifferent to the opinions of the world.”

— Joseph Campbell

126. “I think of mythology as the homeland of the muses, the inspirers of art, the inspirers of poetry. To see life as a poem and yourself participating in a poem is what the myth does for you.”

— Joseph Campbell

127. “Myth is much more important and true than history. History is just journalism and you know how reliable that is.”

— Joseph Campbell

128. “Follow your bliss and don’t be afraid, and door will open where you didn’t know they were going to be.”

— Joseph Campbell

129. “Awe is what moves us forward.”

— Joseph Campbell

130. “To find your own way is to follow your bliss. This involves analysis, watching yourself and seeing where real deep bliss is – not the quick little excitement, but the real deep, life-filling bliss.”

— Joseph Campbell

131. “The demon that you can swallow gives you it’s power, and the greater life’s pain, the greater life’s reply.”

— Joseph Campbell

132. “The insecure way is the secure way.”

— Joseph Campbell

133. “Apocalypse does not point to a fiery Armageddon, but to our ignorance and complacency coming to an end.”

— Joseph Campbell

134. “Every religion, every mythology is true in this sense: It is true as metaphorical of the human and cosmic mystery.”

— Joseph Campbell

135. “The idea of the Bodhisattva is the one who out of his realization of transcendence participates in the world. The imitation of Christ is joyful participation in the sorrows of the world.”

— Joseph Campbell

136. “Mythology helps you to identify the mysteries of the energies pouring through you. Therein lies your eternity.”

— Joseph Campbell

137. “The purpose of the journey is compassion. When you have come past the pairs of opposites, you have reached compassion.”

— Joseph Campbell

138. “Seek to know the power that is within you.”

— Joseph Campbell

139. “Survival is the second law of life. The first is that we are all one.”

— Joseph Campbell

140. “It’s only when a man tames his own demons that he becomes the king of himself if not of the world.”

— Joseph Campbell

141. “Follow your inner heart and the world moves in and helps.”

— Joseph Campbell

142. “The Deadheads are doing the dance of life and this I would say is the answer to the atom bomb.”

— Joseph Campbell

143. “You must have a place to which you can go in your heart, your mind, or your house, almost every day, where you do not owe anyone and where no one owes you – a place that simply allows for the blossoming of something new and promising.”

— Joseph Campbell

144. “God is an intelligible sphere-a sphere known to mind, not to the senses-whose center is everywhere and whose circumference nowhere.”

— Joseph Campbell

145. “Our life evokes our character. You find out more about yourself as you go on. That’s why it’s good to put yourself in situations that will evoke your higher nature rather than your lower.”

— Joseph Campbell

146. “Participate joyfully in the sorrows of the world. We cannot cure the world of sorrows, but we can choose to live in joy. The warrior’s approach is to say “yes” to life: “yea” to it all.”

— Joseph Campbell

147. “Every religion is true one way or another. It is true when understood metaphorically. But when it gets stuck in its own metaphors, interpreting them as facts, then you are in trouble.”

— Joseph Campbell

148. “What I think is that a good life is one hero journey after another. Over and over again, you are called to the realm of adventure, you are called to new horizons. Each time, there is the same problem: do I dare? And then if you do dare, the dangers are there, and the help also, in the fulfillment or the fiasco.”

— Joseph Campbell

149. “For we have not even to risk the adventure alone, for the heros of all time have gone before us...”

— Joseph Campbell

150. “The last act in the biography of the hero is that of the death or departure.”

— Joseph Campbell