Top 500 Joseph Campbell Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “When before the beauty of a sunset or a mountain, you pause and exclaim, ‘Ah,’ you are participating in divinity.”

— Joseph Campbell

202. “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

203. “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

204. “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

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

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

215. “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

216. “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

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

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

219. “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

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

— Joseph Campbell

221. “The best advise is to take it all as if it had been your intention.”

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

225. “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

226. “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

227. “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

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

— Joseph Campbell

229. “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

230. “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

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

— Joseph Campbell

232. “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

233. “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

234. “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

235. “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

236. “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

237. “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

238. “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

239. “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

240. “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

241. “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

242. “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

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

— Joseph Campbell

244. “A ritual is the enactment of a myth. And, by participating in the ritual, you are participating in the myth. And since myth is a projection of the depth wisdom of the psyche, by participating in a ritual, participating in the myth, you are being, as it were, put in accord with that wisdom, which is the wisdom that is inherent within you anyhow. Your consciousness is being re-minded of the wisdom of your own life. I think ritual is terribly important.”

— Joseph Campbell

245. “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

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

— Joseph Campbell

247. “Hell is life drying up.”

— Joseph Campbell

248. “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

249. “The creative act is not hanging on, but yielding to a new creative movement. Awe is what moves us forward.”

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell