Top 500 Joseph Campbell Quotes (2023 Update)
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401. “People who don’t have a concept of the whole can do very unfortunate things.”

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

405. “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

406. “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

407. “The creative act is not hanging on, but yielding to a new creative movement. Awe is what moves us forward.”

— Joseph Campbell

408. “An old Apache storyteller reminds us.”

— Joseph Campbell

409. “Each of us has capacities. The real trick is knowing the machinery of the boat in which you are crossing the channel.”

— Joseph Campbell

410. “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.”

— Joseph Campbell

411. “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.”

— Joseph Campbell

412. “I think it’s important to live life with a knowledge of its mystery, and of your own mystery.”

— Joseph Campbell

413. “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

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

— Joseph Campbell

415. “A ritual is the enactment of a myth.”

— Joseph Campbell

416. “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

417. “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

418. “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

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

— Joseph Campbell

420. “The mighty hero of extraordinary powers, able to lift Mount Govardhan on a finger, and to fill himself with the terrible glory of the universe, is each of us: not the physical self visible in the mirror, but the King within.”

— Joseph Campbell

421. “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

422. “Making the inner meet the outer is the function of the artist.”

— Joseph Campbell

423. “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

424. “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

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

— Joseph Campbell

426. “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

427. “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.”

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

429. “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

430. “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.”

— Joseph Campbell

431. “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

432. “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

433. “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

434. “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

435. “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

436. “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

437. “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

438. “Not all who hesitate are lost.”

— Joseph Campbell

439. “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

440. “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

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

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

443. “The girl was absorbed in him, without consciousness or shame.”

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

445. “The first function of mythology is showing everything as a metaphor to transcendence.”

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

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

— Joseph Campbell

448. “People often think of the Goddess as a fertility deity only. Not at all – she’s the muse. She’s the inspirer of poetry. She’s the inspirer of the spirit. So, she has three functions: one, to give us life; two, to be the one who receives us in death; and three, to inspire our spiritual, poetic realization.”

— Joseph Campbell

449. “Art brings out the grand lines of nature. Antione Bourdelle.”

— Joseph Campbell

450. “Passion makes most psychiatrists nervous.”

— Joseph Campbell