Top 500 Joseph Campbell Quotes (2023 Update)
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351. “The best advise is to take it all as if it had been your intention.”

— Joseph Campbell

352. “Religon is misunderstood mythology.”

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

354. “Whether Jewish or Christian, our religions have stressed too strongly the strictly historical aspect, so that we are, so to say, in worship of the historical event, instead of being able to read through that event to the spiritual message for ourselves. People turn to Oriental religion because therein they find the real message which has been closed by excessive literalism and historicism in their own religion and which is now open to them.”

— Joseph Campbell

355. “You can get a lot of work done if you stay with it and are excited and its play instead of work.”

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

357. “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

358. “Our life evokes our character and you find out more about yourself as you go on.”

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

360. “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

361. “Mythology is not a lie, mythology is poetry, it is metaphorical. It has been well said that mythology is the penultimate truth – penultimate because the ultimate cannot be put into words. It is beyond words. Beyond images, beyond that bounding rim of the Buddhist Wheel of Becoming. Mythology pitches the mind beyond that rim, to what can be known but not told.”

— Joseph Campbell

362. “The best things cannot be told, the second best are misunderstood. After that comes civilized conversation; after that, mass indoctrination; after that, intercultural exchange.”

— Joseph Campbell

363. “The function of the artist is the mythologization of the culture and the world. In the visual arts there were two men whose work handled mythological themes in a marvelous way: Paul Klee and Pablo Picasso.”

— Joseph Campbell

364. “Eternity is not future or past. Eternity is a dimension of now. It is a dimension of the human spirit – which is eternal. Find that eternal dimension in yourself, and you will ride through time, and throughout the whole length of your days.”

— Joseph Campbell

365. “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

366. “The quest for fire occurred not because anyone knew what the practical uses for fire would be, but because it was fascinating.”

— Joseph Campbell

367. “When you make the sacrifice in marriage, you’re sacrificing not to each other but to unity in a relationship.”

— Joseph Campbell

368. “Preachers err by trying to talk people into belief; better they reveal the radiance of their own discovery.”

— Joseph Campbell

369. “The secret cause of all suffering,” he said, “is mortality itself, which is the prime condition of life. It cannot be denied if life is to be affirmed.”

— Joseph Campbell

370. “So that’s what destiny is: simply the fulfillment of the potentialites of the energies in your own system.”

— Joseph Campbell

371. “The seizure of passionate love can be, in such a context, only illicit, breaking in upon the order of one’s dutiful life in virtue as a devastating storm.”

— Joseph Campbell

372. “This is an important point about symbols: they do not refer to historical events; they refer through historical events to spiritual or psychological principles and powers that are of yesterday, today, and tomorrow, and that are everywhere.”

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

374. “The Greeks, it will be recalled, regarded Eros, the god of love, as the eldest of the gods; but also as the youngest, born fresh and dewy-eyed in every living heart.”

— Joseph Campbell

375. “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

376. “You know, when real trouble comes your humanity is awakened. The fundamental human experience is that of compassion.”

— Joseph Campbell

377. “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

378. “You’ve got to say yes to this miracle of life as it is, not on condition that it follow your rules.”

— Joseph Campbell

379. “Eternity has nothing to do with time. Time is what shuts you out from eternity. Eternity is now. It is the transcendent dimension of the now to which myth refers.”

— Joseph Campbell

380. “At such moments, you realize that you and the other are, in fact, one. It’s a big realization. Survival is the second law of life. The first is that we are all one.”

— Joseph Campbell

381. “The departure from the world is regarded not as a fault, but as the first step into that noble path at the remotest turn of which illumination is to be won.”

— Joseph Campbell

382. “He must put aside his pride, his virtue, beauty and life and bow or submit to the absolutely intolerable.”

— Joseph Campbell

383. “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

384. “The world is full of people who have stopped listening to themselves.”

— Joseph Campbell

385. “Where is your bliss station? You have to try to find it.”

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

387. “Tragedy is an unfinished comedy.”

— Joseph Campbell

388. “If you realize what the real problem is-losing yourself-you realize that this itself is the ultimate trial.”

— Joseph Campbell

389. “You have to learn to recognize your own depth.”

— Joseph Campbell

390. “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

391. “I always tell my students follow your bliss. When you have that feeling then stay with it and don’t let anyone throw you off.”

— Joseph Campbell

392. “Vegetarianism is the first turning away from life, because life lives on lives. Vegetarians are just eating something that can’t run away.”

— Joseph Campbell

393. “Heroism is a matter of integrity – beco ming more and more at each step ourselves.”

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

395. “The perfect human being is uninteresting-the Buddha who leaves the world, you know. It is the imperfections of life that are lovable.”

— Joseph Campbell

396. “You don’t have to believe that there was a King Arthur to get the significance of those stories, but Christians say we have to believe there was a Christ, or the miracles don’t make sense.”

— Joseph Campbell

397. “Chief Seattle, of the Indians that inhabited the Seattle area, wrote a wonderful paper that has to do with putting oneself in tune with the universe. He said.”

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

399. “All babies are Buddha babies.”

— Joseph Campbell

400. “Essentially, mythologies are enormous poems that are renditions of insights, giving some sense of the marvel, the miracle and wonder of life.”

— Joseph Campbell