Top 500 Joseph Campbell Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “The problem in middle life, when the body has reached its climax of power and begins to decline, is to identify yourself not with the body, which is falling away, but with the consciousness of which it is a vehicle. This is something I learned from myths.”

— Joseph Campbell

152. “The adventure is always and everywhere a passage beyond the veil of the known into the unknown; the powers that watch at the boundary are dangerous; to deal with them is risky; yet for anyone with competence and courage the danger fades.”

— Joseph Campbell

153. “The experience of Eternity right here and now, is the function of life.”

— Joseph Campbell

154. “Love is the burning point of life, and since all life is sorrowful, so is love. The stronger the love, the more the pain. Love itself is pain, you might say -the pain of being truly alive.”

— Joseph Campbell

155. “A one sentence definition of mythology? Mythology is what we call someone else’s religion.”

— Joseph Campbell

156. “A hero is not a champion of things become, but of things becoming; the dragon to be slain by him is precisely the monster of the status quo.”

— Joseph Campbell

157. “Whether you call someone a hero or a monster is all relative to where the focus of your consciousness may be.”

— Joseph Campbell

158. “God is a metaphor for that which transcends all levels of intellectual thought. It’s as simple as that.”

— Joseph Campbell

159. “You become mature when you become the authority of your own life.”

— Joseph Campbell

160. “You have been thinking one way. Now you have to think a different way.”

— Joseph Campbell

161. “One can experience an unconditional affirmation of life only when one has accepted death, not as contrary to life, but as an aspect of it.”

— Joseph Campbell

162. “Life lives on life. This is the sense of the symbol of the Ouroboros, the serpent biting its tail. Everything that lives lives on the death of something else. Your own body will be food for something else. Anyone who denies this, anyone who holds back, is out of order. Death is an act of giving.”

— Joseph Campbell

163. “Our true reality is in our identity and unity with all life.”

— Joseph Campbell

164. “Mythological symbols touch and exhilarate centers of life beyond the reach of vocabularies of reason and coercion.”

— Joseph Campbell

165. “Where you stumble, there lies your treasure.”

— Joseph Campbell

166. “Both the artist and the lover know that perfection is not loveable. It is the clumsiness of a fault that makes a person lovable.”

— Joseph Campbell

167. “Poetry comes out of an elite experience, the experience of people whose ears are opened to the song of the universe.”

— Joseph Campbell

168. “Every people is a chosen people in its own mind. And it is rather amusing that their name for themselves usually means mankind.”

— Joseph Campbell

169. “When we follow our bliss, we are met by a thousand unseen helping hands.”

— Joseph Campbell

170. “When you are required to exhibit strength, it comes.”

— Joseph Campbell

171. “If you want the whole thing, the gods will give it to you. But you must be ready for it.”

— Joseph Campbell

172. “Art is the set of wings to carry you out of your own entanglement.”

— Joseph Campbell

173. “We are the consciousness of the earth. We are the eyes of the earth. The voice of the earth.”

— Joseph Campbell

174. “The old skin has to be shed before the new one can come.”

— Joseph Campbell

175. “When you are on your path, and it is truly your path, doors will open for you where there were no doors for someone else.”

— Joseph Campbell

176. “The ground of being is the ground of our being, and when we simply turn outward, we see all of these little problems here and there. But, if we look inward, we see that we are the source of them all.”

— Joseph Campbell

177. “The goal of life is rapture. Art is the way we experience it.”

— Joseph Campbell

178. “Through dreams a door is opened to mythology, since myths are of the nature of dreams, and that, as dreams arise from an inward world unknown to waking consciousness, so do myths: so, indeed, does life.”

— Joseph Campbell

179. “The familiar life horizon has been outgrown: the old concepts, ideals, and emotional patterns no longer fit; the time for the passing of a threshold is at hand.”

— Joseph Campbell

180. “A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder. Fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won.”

— Joseph Campbell

181. “The dance is the highest symbol of life itself.”

— Joseph Campbell

182. “The myth does not point to a fact; the myth points beyond facts to something that informs the fact.”

— Joseph Campbell

183. “Behind all these manifestations is the one radiance, which shines through all things. The function of art is to reveal this radiance through the created object.”

— Joseph Campbell

184. “At first you might find that nothing happens there. But if you have a sacred space and use it, eventually something will happen. Your sacred space is where you find yourself again and again.”

— Joseph Campbell

185. “The realms of the gods and demons – heaven, purgatory, hell – are of the substance of dreams. Myth, in this view, is the dream of the world.”

— Joseph Campbell

186. “Mythology is often defined as ‘other peoples’ religions’, religion can be thought of as misinterpreted mythology.”

— Joseph Campbell

187. “Ducunt volentem fata, nolentem trahunt: “The Fates lead him who will; him who won’t, they drag.”

— Joseph Campbell

188. “Any disaster you can survive is an improvement in your character, your stature, and your life.”

— Joseph Campbell

189. “Writer’s block results from too much head. Cut off your head. Pegasus, poetry, was born of Medusa when her head was cut off. You have to be reckless when writing. Be as crazy as your conscience allows.”

— Joseph Campbell

190. “The one radiance shines through all things.”

— Joseph Campbell

191. “The adventure of the hero is the adventure of being alive.”

— Joseph Campbell

192. “Perhaps some of us have to go through dark and devious ways before we can find the river of peace or the highroad to the soul’s destination.”

— Joseph Campbell

193. “God is within you! You yourself are the creator. If you find that place within you from which you brought this thing about, you will be able to live with it and affirm it, perhaps even enjoy it, as your life.”

— Joseph Campbell

194. “What each must seek in his life never was on land or sea. It is something out of his own unique potentiality for experience, something that never has been and never could have been experienced by anyone else.”

— Joseph Campbell

195. “Mythology is not a lie, mythology is poetry, it is metaphorical. It has been well said that mythology is the penultimate truth – penultimate because the ultimate cannot be put into words. It is beyond words. Beyond images, beyond that bounding rim of the Buddhist Wheel of Becoming. Mythology pitches the mind beyond that rim, to what can be known but not told.”

— Joseph Campbell

196. “You can get a lot of work done if you stay with it and are excited and its play instead of work.”

— Joseph Campbell

197. “Life is without meaning. You bring the meaning to it.”

— Joseph Campbell

198. “When before the beauty of a sunset or a mountain, you pause and exclaim, ‘Ah,’ you are participating in divinity.”

— Joseph Campbell

199. “Money is congealed energy, and releasing it releases life’s possibilities.”

— Joseph Campbell

200. “When people get married because they think it’s a long-time love affair, they’ll be divorced very soon, because all love affairs end in disappointment. But marriage is a recognition of a spiritual identity.”

— Joseph Campbell