Top 500 Joseph Campbell Quotes (2025 Update)
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401. “I will never forget the experience I had when I was in Japan, a place that never heard of the Fall and the Garden of Eden. One of the Shinto texts says that the processes of nature cannot be evil. Every natural impulse is not to be corrected but to be sublimated, to be beautified. There is a glorious interest in the beauty of nature and cooperation with nature, so that in some of those gardens you don’t know where nature begins and art ends – this was a tremendous experience.”

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

404. “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

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

— Joseph Campbell

406. “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

407. “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

408. “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

409. “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

410. “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

411. “Tragedy is an unfinished comedy.”

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

416. “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

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

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

419. “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

420. “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

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

— Joseph Campbell

422. “The idea of Truth with capital “T”-that there is something called Truth that’s beyond the range of the relativity of the human mind trying to think-is what I call “the error of the found truth.” The trouble with all of these damned preachers is the error of the found truth. When they get that tremolo in the voice and tell you what God has said, you know you’ve got a faker.”

— Joseph Campbell

423. “There is no make-believe about heaven, future bliss, and compensation, to alleviate the bitter majesty, but only utter darkness, the void of unfulfillment, to receive and eat back the lives that have been tossed forth from the womb only to fail.”

— Joseph Campbell

424. “All babies are Buddha babies.”

— Joseph Campbell

425. “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

426. “The myth is not my own; I have it from my mother. Euripides.”

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

428. “No tribal rite has yet been recorded which attempts to keep winter from descending; on the contrary: the rites all prepare the community to endure, together with the rest of nature, the season of the terrible cold.”

— Joseph Campbell

429. “In the absence of an effective general mythology, each of us has his private, unrecognized, rudimentary, yet secretly potent pantheon of dreams.”

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

431. “The only way you can talk about this great tide in which you’re a participant is as Schopenhauer did: the universe is a dream dreamed by a single dreamer where all the dream characters dream too.”

— Joseph Campbell

432. “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

433. “This is all I ever wanted – to help students and artists see myth as a reflection of the one sublime adventure of life, and then to breathe new life into it.”

— Joseph Campbell

434. “This is one of the glorious things about the mother-goddess religions, where the world is the body of the Goddess, divine in itself, and divinity isn’t something ruling over and above a fallen nature.”

— Joseph Campbell

435. “Any god who can invent hell is no candidate for the Salvation Army.”

— Joseph Campbell

436. “The encounter and separation, for all its wildness, is typical of the sufferings of love. For when a heart insists on its destiny, resisting the general blandishment, then the agony is great; so too the danger. Forces, however, will have been set in motion beyond the reckoning of the senses. Sequences of events from the corners of the world will draw gradually together, and miracles of coincidence bring the inevitable to pass.”

— Joseph Campbell

437. “Woman, in the picture language of mythology, represents the totality of what can be known. The hero is the one who comes to know... And if he can match her import, the two, the knower and the known, will be released from every limitation... The hero who can take her as she is, without undue commotion but with the kindness and assurance she requires, is potentially the king, the incarnate god, of her created world.”

— Joseph Campbell

438. “Life will always be sorrowful. We can’t change it, but we can change our attitude toward it.”

— Joseph Campbell

439. “You don’t understand death, you learn to acquiesce in death.”

— Joseph Campbell

440. “The inflated ego of the tyrant is a curse to himself and his world – no matter how his affairs may prosper. Self-terrorized, fear-haunted, alert at every hand to meet and battle back the anticipated aggressions of his environment, which are primarily the reflections of the uncontrollable impulses to acquisition within himself. The giant of self-achieved independence is the world’s messenger of disaster, even though, in his mind, he may entertain himself with humane intentions.”

— Joseph Campbell

441. “How to teach again what has been taught correctly it incorrectly 1000 thousand times, throughout the millenniums of mankind’s prudent folly? That is the hero’s ultimate difficult task. How to render back into light-world language the speech-defying pronouncements of the dark? Many failures attest to the difficulties of this life-affirmative threshold.”

— Joseph Campbell

442. “In our dreams the ageless perils, gargoyles, trials, secret helpers, and instructive figures are nightly still encountered; and in their forms we may see reflected not only the whole picture of our present case, but also the clue to what we must do to be saved.”

— Joseph Campbell

443. “Modern romance, like Greek tragedy, celebrates the mystery of dismemberment, which is life in time. The happy ending is justly scorned as a misrepresentation; for the world, as we know it, as we have seen it, yields but one ending: death, disintegration, dismemberment, and the crucifixion of our heart with the passing of the forms that we have loved.”

— Joseph Campbell

444. “Our time has changed, and it’s changed and changed, and it continues to change so fast, that what was proper fifty years ago is not proper today. So the virtues of the past are the vices of today, and many of what were thought to be the vices of the past are the necessities of today. And the moral order has to catch up with the moral necessities of actual life in time, here and now, and that’s what it’s not doing, and that’s why it’s ridiculous to go back to the old-time religion.”

— Joseph Campbell

445. “In comparison with all this, our little stories of achievement seem pitiful; Too well we know what bitterness of failure, loss, disillusionment, and ironic unfulfillment galls the blood of even the envied of the world!”

— Joseph Campbell

446. “Not all who hesitate are lost.”

— Joseph Campbell

447. “Passion makes most psychiatrists nervous.”

— Joseph Campbell

448. “Myth is much more important and true than history.”

— Joseph Campbell

449. “Where there is a way or a path, it’s someone else’s way.”

— Joseph Campbell

450. “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