Top 500 Joseph Campbell Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “Only birth can conquer death – the birth, not of the old thing again, but of something new .”

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

303. “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

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

— Joseph Campbell

305. “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

306. “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

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

— Joseph Campbell

308. “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

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

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

311. “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

312. “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

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

— Joseph Campbell

314. “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

315. “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

316. “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

317. “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

318. “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

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

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

321. “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

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

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

324. “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

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

— Joseph Campbell

326. “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

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

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

332. “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

333. “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

334. “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

335. “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

336. “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

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

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

339. “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

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

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

342. “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

343. “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

344. “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

345. “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

346. “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

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

— Joseph Campbell

348. “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

349. “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

350. “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