Top 500 Joseph Campbell Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “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

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

— Joseph Campbell

253. “Hell is life drying up.”

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

255. “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

256. “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

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

— Joseph Campbell

258. “The entire heavenly realm is within us, but to find it we have to relate to what’s outside.”

— Joseph Campbell

259. “What we are really living for is the experience of life, both the pain and the pleasure.”

— Joseph Campbell

260. “Nirvana is right here, in the midst of the turmoil of life. It is the state you find when you are no longer driven to live by compelling desires, fears, and social commitments, when you have found your center of freedom and can act by choice out of that. Voluntary action out of this center is the action of the bodhisattvas – joyful participation in the sorrows of the world. You are not grabbed, because you have released yourself from the grabbers of fear, lust, and duties.”

— Joseph Campbell

261. “Making the inner meet the outer is the function of the artist.”

— Joseph Campbell

262. “Such an image of one’s god becomes a final obstruction, one’s ultimate barrier. You hold on to your own ideology, your own little manner of thinking, and when a larger experience of God approaches, an experience greater than you are prepared to receive, you take flight from it by clinging to the image in your mind. This is known as preserving your faith.”

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

264. “You really can’t follow a guru. You can’t ask somebody to give The Reason, but you can find one for yourself; you decide what the meaning of your life is to be. People talk about the meaning of life; there is no meaning of life – there are lots of meanings of different lives, and you must decide what you want your own to be.”

— Joseph Campbell

265. “Do what gives you bliss.”

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

267. “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

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

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

270. “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

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

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

273. “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

274. “When you get to be older, and the concerns of the day have all been attended to, and you turn to the inner life – well, if you don’t know where it is or what it is, you’ll be sorry.”

— Joseph Campbell

275. “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

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

— Joseph Campbell

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277. “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

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

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

281. “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

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

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

284. “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

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

— Joseph Campbell

286. “The quest for fire occurred not because anyone knew what the practical uses for fire would be, but because it was fascinating.”

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

288. “Your ego is your embodiment and your self is your potentiality and that’s what you listen to when you listen for the voice of inspiration and the voice of ‘What am I here for? What can I possibly make of myself?’”

— Joseph Campbell

289. “The central point of the world is the point where stillness and movement are together. Movement is time, but stillness is eternity. Realizing how this moment of your life is actually a moment of eternity, and experiencing the eternal aspect of what you’re doing in the temporal experience – this is the mythological experience. So is the central mountain of the world Jerusalem? Rome? Benares? Lhasa? Mexico City?”

— Joseph Campbell

290. “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

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

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

293. “Anything you do has a still point. When you are in that still point, you can perform maximally.”

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

295. “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

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

— Joseph Campbell

297. “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

298. “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

299. “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

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

— Joseph Campbell