Top 500 Joseph Campbell Quotes (2023 Update)
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251. “I think what we lack isn’t science, but poetry that reveals what the heart is ready to recognize.”

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

253. “If you want to find out what it means to have a society without any rituals, read the New York Times.”

— Joseph Campbell

254. “Do what gives you bliss.”

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

256. “I think of compassion as the fundamental religious experience and, unless that is there, you have nothing.”

— Joseph Campbell

257. “All life stinks and you must embrace that with compassion.”

— Joseph Campbell

258. “One of the many distinctions between the celebrity and the hero, he said, is that one lives for self while the other acts to redeem society.”

— Joseph Campbell

259. “If you can see your path clearly in front of you, it’s probably someone else’s.”

— Joseph Campbell

260. “Now, one of the main problems of mythology is reconciling the mind to this brutal precondition of all life, which lives by the killing and eating of lives. You don’t kid yourself by eating only vegetables, either, for they, too, are alive. So the essence of life is this eating of itself! Life lives on lives, and the reconciliation of the human mind and sensibilities to that fundamental fact.”

— Joseph Campbell

261. “And so Galahad decided that it would be a disgrace to set off on a quest with the other knights. Alone he would enter the dark forest where there was no path. This is the myth of The Hero’s Journey.”

— Joseph Campbell

262. “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

263. “The water in which the mystic swims is the same water a madman drowns in.”

— Joseph Campbell

264. “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

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

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

268. “Dream is the personalized myth, myth the depersonalized dream.”

— Joseph Campbell

269. “One of our problems today is that we are not well acquainted with the literature of the spirit. We re interested in the news of the day and the problems of the hour.”

— Joseph Campbell

270. “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

271. “The hero, therefore, is the man or woman who has been able to battle past his personal and local historical limitations.”

— Joseph Campbell

272. “There’s always the possibility of a fiasco. But there’s also the possibility of bliss.”

— Joseph Campbell

273. “The Hindus, for example, don’t believe in special revelation. They speak of a state in which the ears have opened to the song of the universe. Here the eye has opened to the radiance of the mind of God. And that’s a fundamental deist idea.”

— Joseph Campbell

274. “Only birth can conquer death – the birth, not of the old thing again, but of something new .”

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

276. “Wars and temper tantrums are the makeshifts of ignorance; regrets are illuminations come too late.”

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

278. “There seem to be only two kinds of people: Those who think that metaphors are facts, and those who know that they are not facts. Those who know they are not facts are what we call “atheists,” and those who think they are facts are “religious.” Which group really gets the message?”

— Joseph Campbell

279. “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

280. “Willed introversion, in fact, is one of the classic implements of creative genius and can be employed as a deliberate device.”

— Joseph Campbell

281. “The hero is the champion of things becoming, not of things become, because he is.”

— Joseph Campbell

282. “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

283. “They thought that it would be a disgrace to go forth as a group. Each entered the forest at a point that he himself had chosen, where it was darkest and there was no path. If there is a path it is someone else’s path and you are not on the adventure.”

— Joseph Campbell

284. “A priest is a functionary of a social sort. The society worships certain deities in a certain way, and the priest becomes ordained as a functionary to carry out that ritual. The deity to whom he is devoted is a deity that was there before he came along. But the shaman’s powers are symbolized in his own familiars, deities of his own personal experience. His authority comes out of a psychological experience, not a social ordination.”

— Joseph Campbell

285. “And so every one of us shares the supreme ordeal – carries the cross of the redeemer – not in the bright moments of his tribe’s great victories, but in the silences of his personal despair.”

— Joseph Campbell

286. “In a wasteland the surface does not represent the actuality of what it is supposed to be representing, and people are living inauthentic lives. “I’ve never done a thing I wanted to in all my life. I’ve done as I was told.” You know?”

— Joseph Campbell

287. “Love thine enemies because they are the instruments of your destiny.”

— Joseph Campbell

288. “Economics and politics are the governing powers of life today, and that’s why everything is so screwy.”

— Joseph Campbell

289. “The imitation of Christ is the joyful participation in the sorrows of the world.”

— Joseph Campbell

290. “It is the function of art to carry us beyond speech to experience.”

— Joseph Campbell

291. “If you follow someone else’s way, you are not going to realize your potential.”

— Joseph Campbell

292. “It is a basic idea of practically every war mythology that the enemy is a monster and that in killing him one is protecting the only truly valuable order of human life on earth, which is that, of course, of one’s own people.”

— Joseph Campbell

293. “My definition of mythology is “other people’s religion”, which suggests that ours must be something else. My definition of religion, then, is “misunderstood mythology” – and the misunderstanding consists in mistaking the symbol for the reference. So all the historic events that are so important to us in our tradition should not be important to us in any way except as symbols of power within ourselves.”

— Joseph Campbell

294. “It is remarkable how completely forgotten episodes, when touched with a word, open to the memory – at first vaguely, like the recollection of a dream, but then with increasing clarity and certitude, until at last all is again present, and one wonders how such scenes could have ever been forgotten.”

— Joseph Campbell

295. “A mythological image that has to be explained to the brain is not working.”

— Joseph Campbell

296. “To translate knowledge and information into experience: that seems to be the function of literature and art.”

— Joseph Campbell

297. “Where there is a way or path, it is someone else’s. Each of us has to find his own way.”

— Joseph Campbell

298. “The mystery of life is beyond all human conception. Everything we know is within the terminology of the concepts of being and not being, many and single, true and untrue. We always think in terms of opposites. But God, the ultimate, is beyond the pairs of opposites, that is all there is to it.”

— Joseph Campbell

299. “You can’t say life is useless because it ends in the grave.”

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell