Top 500 Joseph Campbell Quotes (2023 Update)
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301. “It is not only that there is no hiding place for the gods from the searching telescope and microscope; there is no such society any more as the gods once supported.”

— Joseph Campbell

302. “How teach again, however, what has been taught correctly and incorrectly learned a thousand thousand times, throughout the millenniums of mankind’s prudent folly? That is the hero’s ultimate difficult task.”

— Joseph Campbell

303. “Every step they took, she told him something he’d never known before; and yet it always seemed, the moment she’d said it, as if he had known it all his life.”

— Joseph Campbell

304. “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

305. “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

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

— Joseph Campbell

307. “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

308. “And if there was no Fall, what then of the need for Redemption? What god was offended and by whom? Some especially touchy cave bear whose skull had been improperly enshrined?”

— Joseph Campbell

309. “The notion of this universe, its heavens, hells, and everything within it, as a great dream dreamed by a single being in which all the dream characters are dreaming too, has in India enchanted and shaped the entire civilization.”

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

311. “You have to have a feeling for where you are. You’ve got only one life to live and you don’t have to live it for six people. Pay attention to it.”

— Joseph Campbell

312. “For if anything is capable of making a poet of a literary man, it is my hometown love of the human, the living and ordinary.”

— Joseph Campbell

313. “The person who thinks he has found the ultimate truth is wrong.”

— Joseph Campbell

314. “I don’t believe in being interested in a subject just because it’s said to be important. I believe in being caught by it somehow or other.”

— Joseph Campbell

315. “Poets and artists who speak of the mystery are rare.”

— Joseph Campbell

316. “What we’re learning in our schools is not the wisdom of life. We’re learning technologies, we’re getting information. There’s a curious reluctance on the part of faculties to indicate the life values of their subjects.”

— Joseph Campbell

317. “I don’t have to have faith, I have experience.”

— Joseph Campbell

318. “Our own poor poets, I am afraid, have been so intimidated by our clinics and laboratories that they have abandoned the first principles of beginning, that of the festival; and the heart of the festival has always been the atmosphere of myth, of delight.”

— Joseph Campbell

319. “Whenever men have looked for something solid on which to found their lives, they have chosen not the facts in which the world abounds, but the myths of an immemorial imagination.”

— Joseph Campbell

320. “Man was not breathed into the earth. Man came out of the earth.”

— Joseph Campbell

321. “When a Sioux Indian would take the calumet, the pipe, he would hold it up stem to the sky so that the sun could take the first puff. And then he’d address the four directions always. In that frame of mind, when you’re addressing yourself to the horizon, to the world that you’re in, then you’re in your place in the world. It’s a different way to live.”

— Joseph Campbell

322. “The adventure evoked a quality of his character that he didn’t know he possessed.”

— Joseph Campbell

323. “But the makers of legend have seldom rested content to regard the world’s great heroes as mere human beings who broke past the horizons that limited their fellows and returned such boons as any man with equal faith and courage might have found.”

— Joseph Campbell

324. “The big problem of any young person’s life is to have models to suggest possibilities. Nietzsche says, ‘Man is the sick animal.’ Man is the animal that doesn’t know what to do with itself. The mind has many possibilities, but we can live no more than one life. What are we going to do with ourselves?”

— Joseph Campbell

325. “They are equals, but not the same, because when you lose the tension of polarities you lose the tension of life.”

— Joseph Campbell

326. “The modern hero-deed must be that of questing to bring to light again the lost Atlantis of the co-ordinated Soul.”

— Joseph Campbell

327. “He has yet to confront society with this ego-shattering, life-redeeming elixir, and take the return blow of reasonable queries, hard resentment, and good people at a loss to comprehend.”

— Joseph Campbell

328. “One looks, looks long, and the world comes in.”

— Joseph Campbell

329. “People can go very badly awry in this individual quest. But when the quest is fortunate, there comes a lifetime of creative innovative action.”

— Joseph Campbell

330. “Humor is the touchstone of the truly mythological as distinct from the more literal-minded and sentimental theological mood.”

— Joseph Campbell

331. “From this point of view the hero is symbolical of that divine creative and redemptive image which is hidden within us all, only waiting to be known and rendered into life.”

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

333. “Man actually needs the striving and struggling for some goal worthy of him.”

— Joseph Campbell

334. “Change the focus of the eye. When you have done that, then the end of the world as you formerly knew it will have occurred, and you will experience the radiance of the divine presence everywhere, here and now.”

— Joseph Campbell

335. “When your mind is simply trapped by the image out there so that you never make the reference to yourself, you have misread the image.”

— Joseph Campbell

336. “When people find out what it is that’s ticking in them, they get straightened out.”

— Joseph Campbell

337. “We are having experiences all the time which may on occasion render some sense of this, a little intuition of where your bliss is. Grab it. No one can tell you what it is going to be. You have to learn to recognize your own depth.”

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

339. “Myth must be kept alive. The people who can keep it alive are the artists of one kind or another.”

— Joseph Campbell

340. “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

341. “I think what we are looking for is a way of experiencing the world that will open to us the transcendent that informs it, and at the same time forms ourselves within it. That is what people want. That is what the soul asks for.”

— Joseph Campbell

342. “Mythologies, in other words, mythologies and religions are great poems and, when recognized as such, point infallibly through things and events to the ubiquity of a.”

— Joseph Campbell

343. “One great thing about growing old is that nothing is going to lead to anything. Everything is of the moment.”

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

345. “It is, indeed, very little that we need! But lacking that, the adventure into the labyrinth is without hope.”

— Joseph Campbell

346. “The mind of man, cleansed of secondary and merely temporal concerns, beholds with the radiance of a cleansed mirror a reflection of the rational mind of God.”

— Joseph Campbell

347. “It has always been the prime function of mythology and rite to supply the symbols that carry the human spirit forward, in counteraction to those that tend to tie it back.”

— Joseph Campbell

348. “Great Brahma from his mystic heaven groans, And all his priesthood moans.”

— Joseph Campbell

349. “Without passion, men are not willing to pay any price or bear any burden to set the captives free.”

— Joseph Campbell

350. “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