Top 500 Joseph Campbell Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “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

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

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

204. “The world is full of people who have stopped listening to themselves or have listened only to their neighbors to learn what they ought to do, how they ought to behave, and what the values are they should be living for.”

— Joseph Campbell

205. “The role of the artist I now understood as that of revealing through the world-surfaces the implicit forms of the soul, and the great agent to assist the artist was the myth.”

— Joseph Campbell

206. “Gods suppressed become devils, and often it is these devils whom we first encounter when we turn inward.”

— Joseph Campbell

207. “Vegetarians are people who cannot hear tomatos screaming.”

— Joseph Campbell

208. “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

209. “The courage to face the trials and to bring a whole new body of possibilities into the field of interpreted experience for other people to experience – that is the hero’s deed.”

— Joseph Campbell

210. “Myths are clues to the spiritual potentialities of the human life.”

— Joseph Campbell

211. “It is not society which is to guide and save the creative hero, but precisely the reverse.”

— Joseph Campbell

212. “The idea of Buddha consciousness is that all beings are Buddha beings, and your whole function in meditation and everything else is to find that Buddha consciousness within and live out of that, instead of the interests of the eyes and ears.”

— Joseph Campbell

213. “The senses are a kind of reason. Taste, touch and smell, hearing and seeing, are not merely a means to sensation, enjoyable or otherwise, but they are also a means to knowledge – and are, indeed, your only actual means to knowledge.”

— Joseph Campbell

214. “Let the world be as it is and learn to rock with the waves.”

— Joseph Campbell

215. “If you travel far enough, you’ll eventually meet yourself.”

— Joseph Campbell

216. “Art is the clothing of a revelation.”

— Joseph Campbell

217. “When you follow your bliss a kind of track opens up, that’s always been there, waiting for you. And the life that you should be living, is the one that you will be living.”

— Joseph Campbell

218. “The experience of eternity right here and now is the function of life. Heaven is not the place to have the experience; here is the place to have the experience.”

— Joseph Campbell

219. “A woman is a vehicle of life. Life has overtaken her. Woman is what it is all about-the giving of birth and the giving of nourishment.”

— Joseph Campbell

220. “The process of nature cannot be evil.”

— Joseph Campbell

221. “Hell is life drying up.”

— Joseph Campbell

222. “One way or another, we all have to find what best fosters the flowering of our humanity in this contemporary life, and dedicate ourselves to that.”

— Joseph Campbell

223. “We need myths that will identify the individual not with his local group but with the planet.”

— Joseph Campbell

224. “What does the soul truly want is a story.”

— Joseph Campbell

225. “We know that Jesus could not have ascended to heaven because there is no physical heaven anywhere in the universe. Even ascending at the speed of light, Jesus would still be in the galaxy.”

— Joseph Campbell

226. “Mythology is the womb of man’s initiation to life and death.”

— Joseph Campbell

227. “Once you know the difference between right and wrong, you have lots fewer decisions to make.”

— Joseph Campbell

228. “Follow your bliss. The heroic life is living the individual adventure.”

— Joseph Campbell

229. “The fundamental human experience is that of compassion.”

— Joseph Campbell

230. “The less there is of you, the more you experience the sublime.”

— Joseph Campbell

231. “Our life evokes our character and you find out more about yourself as you go on.”

— Joseph Campbell

232. “The influence of a vital being vitalizes.”

— Joseph Campbell

233. “Do what gives you bliss.”

— Joseph Campbell

234. “The folktale is the primer of the picture-language of the soul.”

— Joseph Campbell

235. “If marriage isn’t a first priority in your life, you’re not married.”

— Joseph Campbell

236. “The sin of inadvertence, not being alert, not quite awake, is the sin of missing the moment of life-live with unremitting alertness.”

— Joseph Campbell

237. “What is a god? A god is a personification of a motivating power of a value system that functions in human life and in the universe.”

— Joseph Campbell

238. “Out of perfection nothing can be made. Every process involves breaking something up.”

— Joseph Campbell

239. “We are standing on a whale fishing for minnows.”

— Joseph Campbell

240. “Eternity is not future or past. Eternity is a dimension of now. It is a dimension of the human spirit – which is eternal. Find that eternal dimension in yourself, and you will ride through time, and throughout the whole length of your days.”

— Joseph Campbell

241. “All we really want to do is dance.”

— Joseph Campbell

242. “What am I? Am I the bulb that carries the light, or am I the light of which the bulb is a vehicle?”

— Joseph Campbell

243. “A myth is something that has never happened, but is happening all the time.”

— Joseph Campbell

244. “Successful marriage is leading innovative lives together, being open, non-programmed. It’s a free fall: how you handle each new thing as it comes along. As a drop of oil on the sea, you must float, using intellect and compassion to ride the waves.”

— Joseph Campbell

245. “A myth doesn’t have to be real to be true.”

— Joseph Campbell

246. “But marriage is marriage, you know. Marriage is not a love affair. A love affair is a totally different thing. A marriage is a commitment to that which you are. That person is literally your other half. And you and the other are one. A love affair isn’t that. That is a relationship for pleasure, and when it gets to be unpleasurable, its off. But a marriage is a life commitment, and a life commitment means the prime concern of your life. If marriage is not the prime concern, you’re not married.”

— Joseph Campbell

247. “Every myth is psychologically symbolic. Its narratives and images are to be read, therefore, not literally, but as metaphors.”

— Joseph Campbell

248. “Full circle, from to tomb of the womb to the womb of the tomb, we come.”

— Joseph Campbell

249. “Freud tells us to blame our parents for all the shortcomings of our life, Marx tells us to blame the upper class of our society. But the only one to blame is oneself.”

— Joseph Campbell

250. “There’s no meaning. What’s the meaning of the universe? What’s the meaning of a flea? It’s just there. We’re so engaged in doing things to achieve purposes of outer value that we forget the inner value, the rapture that is associated with being alive, is what it’s all about.”

— Joseph Campbell