Top 500 Joseph Campbell Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “The folktale is the primer of the picture-language of the soul.”

— Joseph Campbell

252. “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

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

— Joseph Campbell

254. “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

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

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

257. “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

258. “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

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

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

261. “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

262. “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

263. “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

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

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

267. “Not all who hesitate are lost. The psyche has many secrets in reserve. And these are not disclosed unless required.”

— Joseph Campbell

268. “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

269. “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

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

— Joseph Campbell

271. “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

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

— Joseph Campbell

273. “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

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

— Joseph Campbell

275. “You have to strive every minute to get rid of the life that you have planned in order to have the life that’s waiting to be yours. Move, move, move.”

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

279. “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

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

— Joseph Campbell

281. “If myth is translated into literal fact, then myth is a lie. But if you read it as a reflection of the world inside you, then it’s true. Myth is the penultimate truth.”

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

284. “The perfect human being is uninteresting.”

— Joseph Campbell

285. “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

286. “The call is to leave a certain social situation, move into your own loneliness and find the jewel, the center that’s impossible to find when you’re socially engaged. You are thrown off-center, and when you feel off-center, it’s time to go. This is the departure when the hero feels something has been lost and goes to find it. You are to cross the threshold into new life. It’s a dangerous adventure, because you are moving out of the sphere of the knowledge of you and your community.”

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

288. “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

289. “The happy ending of the fairy tale, the myth, and the divine comedy of the soul is to be read, not as a contradiction, but as a transcendence of the universal tragedy of man. The objective world remains what it was, but, because of a shift of emphasis within the subject, is beheld as though transformed.”

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

291. “The first function of mythology is showing everything as a metaphor to transcendence.”

— Joseph Campbell

292. “Reading what you want, and having one book lead to the next, is the way I found my discipline.”

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

294. “Whether Jewish or Christian, our religions have stressed too strongly the strictly historical aspect, so that we are, so to say, in worship of the historical event, instead of being able to read through that event to the spiritual message for ourselves. People turn to Oriental religion because therein they find the real message which has been closed by excessive literalism and historicism in their own religion and which is now open to them.”

— Joseph Campbell

295. “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

296. “The concept of time shuts off eternity.”

— Joseph Campbell

297. “I think what we lack isn’t science, but poetry that reveals what the heart is ready to recognize.”

— Joseph Campbell

298. “If we fix on the old, we get stuck.”

— Joseph Campbell

299. “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

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

— Joseph Campbell