Top 500 Joseph Campbell Quotes (2024 Update)
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401. “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

402. “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

403. “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

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

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

406. “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

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

— Joseph Campbell

408. “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

409. “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

410. “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

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

— Joseph Campbell

412. “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

413. “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

414. “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

415. “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

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

— Joseph Campbell

417. “Tragedy is an unfinished comedy.”

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

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

422. “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

423. “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

424. “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

425. “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

426. “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

427. “All babies are Buddha babies.”

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

429. “People who don’t have a concept of the whole can do very unfortunate things.”

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

431. “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

432. “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

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

— Joseph Campbell

434. “An old Apache storyteller reminds us.”

— Joseph Campbell

435. “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

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

— Joseph Campbell

437. “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

438. “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

439. “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

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

— Joseph Campbell

441. “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

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

— Joseph Campbell

443. “If you want to understand what’s most important to a society, don’t examine its art or literature, simply look at its biggest buildings.”

— Joseph Campbell

444. “Why re-enter such a world? Why attempt to make plausible, or even interesting, to men and women consumed with passion, the experience of transcendental bliss? As dreams that were momentous by night may seem simply silly in the light of day, so the poet and the prophet can discover themselves playing the idiot before a jury of sober eyes.”

— Joseph Campbell

445. “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

446. “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

447. “He who thinks he knows, doesn’t know. He who knows that he doesn’t know, knows. For in this context, to know is not to know. And not to know is to know.”

— Joseph Campbell

448. “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

449. “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

450. “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