Top 500 Joseph Campbell Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “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

352. “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

353. “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

354. “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

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

— Joseph Campbell

356. “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

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

— Joseph Campbell

358. “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

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

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

361. “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

362. “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

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

— Joseph Campbell

364. “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

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

— Joseph Campbell

366. “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

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

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

369. “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

370. “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

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

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

375. “If you have a sacred place and use it, take advantage of it, something will happen.”

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

378. “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

379. “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

380. “The best way to help mankind is through the perfection of yourself.”

— Joseph Campbell

381. “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

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

— Joseph Campbell

383. “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

384. “All these different mythologies give us the same essential quest. You leave the world that you’re in and go into a depth or into a distance or up to a height. There you come to what was missing in your consciousness in the world you formerly inhabited. Then comes the problem either of staying with that, and letting the world drop off, or returning with that boon and trying to hold on to it as you move back into your social world again. That’s not an easy thing to do.”

— Joseph Campbell

385. “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

386. “In the older view the goddess Universe was alive, herself organically the Earth, the horizon, and the heavens. Now she is dead, and the universe is not an organism, but a building, with gods at rest in it in luxury: not as personifications of the energies in their manners of operation, but as luxury tenants, requiring service. And Man, accordingly, is not as a child born to flower in the knowledge of his own eternal portion but as a robot fashioned to serve.”

— Joseph Campbell

387. “What is it we are questing for? It is the fulfillment of that which is potential in each of us. Questing for it is not an ego trip; it is an adventure to bring into fulfillment your gift to the world, which is yourself. There is nothing you can do that’s more important than being fulfilled. You become a sign, you become a signal, transparent to transcendence; in this way you will find, live, become a realization of your own personal myth.”

— Joseph Campbell

388. “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

389. “You can keep an old tradition going only by renewing it in terms of current circumstances.”

— Joseph Campbell

390. “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

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

— Joseph Campbell

392. “Religon is misunderstood mythology.”

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

394. “Mythology is to relate found truth to the living of a life.”

— Joseph Campbell

395. “The first step to the knowledge of the wonder and mystery of life is the recognition of the monstrous nature of the earthly human realm as well as its glory, the realization that this is just how it is and that it cannot and will not be changed. Those who think they know how the universe could have been had they created it, without pain, without sorrow, without time, without death, are unfit for illumination.”

— Joseph Campbell

396. “You should be willing to be eaten also. You are food body.”

— Joseph Campbell

397. “We have to let go of our plans if we are to become the person we are meant to be.”

— Joseph Campbell

398. “What gods are there, what gods have there ever been, that were not from man’s imagination?”

— Joseph Campbell

399. “For people who are really alive to have life awakened is more important than to get a sandwich.”

— Joseph Campbell

400. “Only when that mortal “you” will have erased everything about itself that it cherishes and is holding to, will “you” have come to the brink of an experience of identity with that Being which is no being yet is the Being beyond the nonbeing of all things. Nor is It anything that you have ever known, ever named, or even thought about in this world:.”

— Joseph Campbell