Top 500 Joseph Campbell Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 6 of 10

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

— Joseph Campbell

252. “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

253. “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

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

— Joseph Campbell

255. “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

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

— Joseph Campbell

257. “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

258. “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

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

— Joseph Campbell

260. “You’ve got to say yes to this miracle of life as it is, not on condition that it follow your rules.”

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

262. “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

263. “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

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

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

269. “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

270. “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

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

— Joseph Campbell

272. “The perfect human being is uninteresting.”

— Joseph Campbell

273. “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

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

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

276. “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

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

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

279. “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

280. “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

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

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

284. “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

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

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

290. “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

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

— Joseph Campbell

292. “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

293. “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

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

— Joseph Campbell

295. “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

296. “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

297. “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

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

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

300. “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