Myths are stories for our search through the ages for truth, for meaning, for significance. We all need to tell our story and to understand our story. We all need to understand death and to cope with death, and we all need help in our passages from birth to live and then to death. We need for life to signify, to touch the eternal, to understand the mysterious, to find out who we are.
Joseph CampbellWell, one of the problems about being psychoanalyzed is, as Nietzsche said, "Be careful lest in casting out your devils that you cast out the best thing that's in you." So many people who are really in deep analysis look as though and act as though they have been filleted. There's no bone there, there's no stuff! How to get rid of ego as dictator and turn it into messenger and servant and scout, to be in your service, is the trick.
Joseph CampbellWhen you are in accord with nature, nature will yield its bounty. This is something that is coming up in our own consciousness now...recognizi ng that by violating the environment in which we are living, we are really cutting off the energy and source of our own living. And itโs this sense of accord, so that living properly in relation to what has to be done in this world one fosters the vitality of the environment.
Joseph CampbellThe priests used to say that faith can move mountains, and nobody believed them. Today the scientists say that they can level mountains, and nobody doubts them.
Joseph CampbellDream is personalized myth, myth is depersonalized dream; both myth and dream are symbolic in the same general way of the dynamics of the psyche. But in the dream the forms are quirked by the peculiar troubles of the dreamer, whereas in myth the problem and solutions shown are directly valid for all mankind.
Joseph Campbell