“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
“The problem of the theologian is to keep his symbol translucent, so that it may not block out the very light it is supposed to convey.”
“The hero is the champion of things becoming, not of things become, because he is.”
“Tragedy is an unfinished comedy.”
“The first function of mythology is showing everything as a metaphor to transcendence.”
“Full circle, from to tomb of the womb to the womb of the tomb, we come.”
“Art brings out the grand lines of nature. Antione Bourdelle.”
“You should be willing to be eaten also. You are food body.”
“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.”
“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.”
“The girl was absorbed in him, without consciousness or shame.”
“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.”
“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.”
“If you travel far enough, you’ll eventually meet yourself.”
“You don’t understand death, you learn to acquiesce in death.”
“If myth is translated into literal fact, then myth is a lie. But if you read it as a reflection of the world inside you, then it’s true. Myth is the penultimate truth.”
“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.”
“The call is to leave a certain social situation, move into your own loneliness and find the jewel, the center that’s impossible to find when you’re socially engaged. You are thrown off-center, and when you feel off-center, it’s time to go. This is the departure when the hero feels something has been lost and goes to find it. You are to cross the threshold into new life. It’s a dangerous adventure, because you are moving out of the sphere of the knowledge of you and your community.”
“The myth is not my own; I have it from my mother. Euripides.”
“Mythology is to relate found truth to the living of a life.”
“They are equals, but not the same, because when you lose the tension of polarities you lose the tension of life.”
“What does the soul truly want is a story.”
“Where there is a way or a path, it’s someone else’s way.”
“The relationship of these two gods is important: Hermes guides souls to the knowledge of eternal life by way of intellectual initiation, while Dionysus represents sudden inspiration, the energy of life pouring through time and throwing off old forms to make new life.”
“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.”
“Significant images render insights beyond speech, beyond the kinds of meaning speech defines. And if they do not speak to you, that is because you are not ready for them, and words will only serve to make you think you have understood, thus cutting you off altogether.”
“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.”
“Myth is much more important and true than history.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Everything, all the time, is causing everything else.”
“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.”
“The fundamental human experience is that of compassion.”
“We have to let go of our plans if we are to become the person we are meant to be.”
“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.”
“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.”
“The best way to help mankind is through the perfection of yourself.”
“Such an image of one’s god becomes a final obstruction, one’s ultimate barrier. You hold on to your own ideology, your own little manner of thinking, and when a larger experience of God approaches, an experience greater than you are prepared to receive, you take flight from it by clinging to the image in your mind. This is known as preserving your faith.”
“Passion makes most psychiatrists nervous.”
“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.”
“A ritual is the enactment of a myth.”
“Vegetarianism is the first turning away from life, because life lives on lives. Vegetarians are just eating something that can’t run away.”
“You can keep an old tradition going only by renewing it in terms of current circumstances.”
“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.”
“Love thine enemies because they are the instruments of your destiny.”
“Where you stumble, there lies your treasure.”
“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!”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
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