Top 500 Joseph Campbell Quotes (2023 Update)
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201. “Where you stumble, there lies your treasure.”

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

203. “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

204. “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

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

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

209. “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

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

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

213. “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

214. “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

215. “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

216. “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

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

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

219. “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

220. “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

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

— Joseph Campbell

222. “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

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

— Joseph Campbell

224. “It’s characteristic of democracy that majority rule is understood as being effective not only in politics but also in thinking. In thinking, of course, the majority is always wrong.”

— Joseph Campbell

225. “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

226. “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

227. “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

228. “Where we had thought to travel outward, we will come to the center of our own existence. And where we had thought to be alone, we will be with all the world.”

— Joseph Campbell

229. “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

230. “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

231. “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

232. “Poets are simply those who have made a profession ans a lifestyle of being in touch with their bliss.”

— Joseph Campbell

233. “Every act has both good and evil results. Every act in life yields pairs of opposites in its results. The best we can do is lean toward the light, toward the harmonious relationships that come from compassion with suffering, from understanding the other person.”

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

235. “Hell is life drying up.”

— Joseph Campbell

236. “I will participate in the game. It is a wonderful, wonderful opera – except that it hurts.”

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

238. “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

239. “You can tell what’s informing a society by what the tallest building is.”

— Joseph Campbell

240. “Our actual ultimate root is in our humanity, not in our personal genealogy.”

— Joseph Campbell

241. “There is a condescension on the part of the infinite to the mind of man. That is what looks like God.”

— Joseph Campbell

242. “The perfect human being is uninteresting.”

— Joseph Campbell

243. “It has always been the prime function of mythology and rite to supply the symbols that carry the human spirit forward.”

— Joseph Campbell

244. “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

245. “What’s made up in the head is the fiction. What comes out of the heart is a myth.”

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

248. “There’s nothing militant about Jesus. I don’t read anything like that in any of the gospels. Peter drew his sword and cut off the servant’s ear, and Jesus said, “Put back thy sword, Peter.” But Peter has had his sword out and at work ever since.”

— Joseph Campbell

249. “I always feel uncomfortable when people speak about ordinary mortals because I’ve never met an ordinary man, woman or child.”

— Joseph Campbell

250. “Now, when Luke Skywalker unmasks his father, he is taking off the machine role that the father has played. The father was the uniform. That is power, the state role.”

— Joseph Campbell