Top 500 Joseph Campbell Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “If you want to find out what it means to have a society without any rituals, read the New York Times.”

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

306. “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

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

— Joseph Campbell

308. “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

309. “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

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

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

314. “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

315. “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

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

— Joseph Campbell

317. “There is an Indian fable of three beings who drank from a river: one was a god, and he drank ambrosia; one was a man, and he drank water; and one was a demon, and he drank filth. What you get is a function of your own consciousness.”

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

319. “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

320. “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

321. “We have today to learn to get back into accord with the wisdom of nature and realize again our brotherhood with the animals and with the water and the sea.”

— Joseph Campbell

322. “The hero is the champion of things becoming, not of things become, because he is.”

— Joseph Campbell

323. “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

324. “It is a basic idea of practically every war mythology that the enemy is a monster and that in killing him one is protecting the only truly valuable order of human life on earth, which is that, of course, of one’s own people.”

— Joseph Campbell

325. “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

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

— Joseph Campbell

327. “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

328. “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

329. “If you are to advance, all fixed ideas must go.”

— Joseph Campbell

330. “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

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

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

333. “Love is exactly as strong as life.”

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

335. “The Fates guide those who will and drag those who won’t!”

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

337. “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

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

— Joseph Campbell

339. “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

340. “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

341. “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

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

— Joseph Campbell

343. “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

344. “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

345. “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

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

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

349. “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

350. “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