Top 500 Joseph Campbell Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “Poets and artists who speak of the mystery are rare.”

— Joseph Campbell

352. “Reading what you want, and having one book lead to the next, is the way I found my discipline.”

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

354. “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

355. “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

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

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

358. “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

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

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

361. “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

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

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

364. “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

365. “Now, when Luke Skywalker unmasks his father, he is taking off the machine role that the father has played. The father was the uniform. That is power, the state role.”

— Joseph Campbell

366. “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

367. “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

368. “The concept of time shuts off eternity.”

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

374. “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

375. “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

376. “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

377. “I think what we lack isn’t science, but poetry that reveals what the heart is ready to recognize.”

— Joseph Campbell

378. “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

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

— Joseph Campbell

380. “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

381. “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

382. “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

383. “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

384. “If you want to find out what it means to have a society without any rituals, read the New York Times.”

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

389. “Religon is misunderstood mythology.”

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

391. “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

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

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

394. “Eternity isn’t some later time. Eternity isn’t some long time. Eternity has nothing to do with time. Eternity is that dimension between here and now, where thinking and time cuts out. If you won’t get it here, you won’t get it anywhere.”

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

396. “Everything, all the time, is causing everything else.”

— Joseph Campbell

397. “When you have lived your individual life in your own adventurous way and then look back upon its course, you will find that you have lived a model human life, after all.”

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

399. “We are all reflexes of the image of the Bodhisattva. The sufferer within us is that divine being.”

— Joseph Campbell

400. “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