Top 500 Joseph Campbell Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “It is the function of art to carry us beyond speech to experience.”

— Joseph Campbell

302. “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

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

— Joseph Campbell

304. “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

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

— Joseph Campbell

306. “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

307. “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

308. “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

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

— Joseph Campbell

310. “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

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

— Joseph Campbell

312. “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

313. “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

314. “The perfect human being is uninteresting.”

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

318. “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

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

— Joseph Campbell

320. “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

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

— Joseph Campbell

322. “A ritual is the enactment of a myth.”

— Joseph Campbell

323. “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

324. “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

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

— Joseph Campbell

326. “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

327. “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

328. “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

329. “People who don’t have a concept of the whole can do very unfortunate things.”

— Joseph Campbell

330. “I think it’s important to live life with a knowledge of its mystery, and of your own mystery.”

— Joseph Campbell

331. “People often think of the Goddess as a fertility deity only. Not at all – she’s the muse. She’s the inspirer of poetry. She’s the inspirer of the spirit. So, she has three functions: one, to give us life; two, to be the one who receives us in death; and three, to inspire our spiritual, poetic realization.”

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

333. “The relationship of these two gods is important: Hermes guides souls to the knowledge of eternal life by way of intellectual initiation, while Dionysus represents sudden inspiration, the energy of life pouring through time and throwing off old forms to make new life.”

— Joseph Campbell

334. “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

335. “It’s important to live life with the experience, and therefore the knowledge, of its mystery and of your own mystery. This gives life a new radiance, a new harmony, a new splendor.”

— Joseph Campbell

336. “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

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

— Joseph Campbell

338. “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

339. “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

340. “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

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

— Joseph Campbell

342. “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

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

— Joseph Campbell

344. “The mighty hero of extraordinary powers, able to lift Mount Govardhan on a finger, and to fill himself with the terrible glory of the universe, is each of us: not the physical self visible in the mirror, but the King within.”

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

346. “Each of us has capacities. The real trick is knowing the machinery of the boat in which you are crossing the channel.”

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

349. “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

350. “He must put aside his pride, his virtue, beauty, and life and bow or submit to the absolutely intolerable. Then he finds that he and his opposite are not of differing species, but one flesh.”

— Joseph Campbell