Top 500 Joseph Campbell Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “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

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

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

206. “Myth is what we call other people’s religion.”

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

209. “The latest incarnation of Oedipus, the continued romance of Beauty and the Beast, stand this afternoon on the corner of 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue, waiting for the traffic light to change.”

— Joseph Campbell

210. “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

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

— Joseph Campbell

212. “There’s nothing you can do that’s more important than being fulfilled. You become a sign, you become a signal, transparent to transcendence; in this way, you will find, live, and become a realization of your own personal myth.”

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

214. “The priests used to say that faith can move mountains, and nobody believed them. Today the scientists say that they can level mountains, and nobody doubts them.”

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

216. “Myths are the world’s dreams. They are archetypal dreams and deal with great human problems. Myths and dreams come from the same place. They come from realizations of some kind that then have to find expression in symbolic form.”

— Joseph Campbell

217. “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

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

— Joseph Campbell

219. “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

220. “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

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

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

223. “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

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

— Joseph Campbell

225. “The journey of the hero is about the courage to seek the depths; the image of creative rebirth; the eternal cycle of change within us; the uncanny discovery that the seeker is the mystery which the seeker seeks to know. The hero journey is a symbol that binds, in the original sense of the word, two distant ideas, the spiritual quest of the ancients with the modern search for identity, “always the one, shape-shifting yet marvelously constant story that we find.”

— Joseph Campbell

226. “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

227. “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

228. “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

229. “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

230. “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

231. “This is an important point about symbols: they do not refer to historical events; they refer through historical events to spiritual or psychological principles and powers that are of yesterday, today, and tomorrow, and that are everywhere.”

— Joseph Campbell

232. “You have to learn to recognize your own depth.”

— Joseph Campbell

233. “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

234. “Furthermore, we have not even to risk the adventure alone; for the heroes of all time have gone before us; the labyrinth is thoroughly known; we have only to follow the thread of the hero-path. And where we had thought to find an abomination, we shall find a god; where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves; where we had thought to travel outward, we shall come to the center of our own existence; and where we had thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world.”

— Joseph Campbell

235. “So that’s what destiny is: simply the fulfillment of the potentialites of the energies in your own system.”

— Joseph Campbell

236. “Myths are so intimately bound to culture, time, and place that unless the symbols, the metaphors, are kept alive by constant recreation through the arts, the life just slips away from them.”

— Joseph Campbell

237. “You’ve got to say yes to this miracle of life as it is, not on condition that it follow your rules.”

— Joseph Campbell

238. “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

239. “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

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

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

242. “Hell is life drying up.”

— Joseph Campbell

243. “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

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

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

249. “Do what gives you bliss.”

— Joseph Campbell

250. “All of life is a meditation, most of it unintentional.”

— Joseph Campbell