Joseph Campbell Quotes

Christianity isn’t moving people’s lives today. What’s moving people’s lives is the stock market and the baseball scores. What are people excited about? It’s a totally materialistic level that has taken over the world. There isn’t even an ideal that anybody’s fighting for.

Mythology is composed by poets out of their insights and realizations. Mythologies are not invented; they are found. You can no more tell us what your dream is going to be tonight than we can invent a myth. Myths come from the mystical region of essential experience.

Marriage is not a simple love affair, it's an ordeal, and the ordeal is the sacrifice of ego to a relationship in which two have become one.

You can't say life is useless because it ends in the grave.

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.

Don't do anything that isn't play

Every religion is true one way or another. It is true when understood metaphorically. But when it gets stuck in its own metaphors, interpreting them as facts, then you are in trouble.

People forget facts, but they remember stories.

The influence of a vital being vitalizes.

I don't have faith, I have experience.

What's made up in the head is the fiction. What comes out of the heart is a myth.

With the moon walk, the religious myth that sustained these notions could no longer be held. With our view of earthrise, we could see that the earth and the heavens were no longer divided but that the earth is in the heavens. (105)

I think of mythology as the homeland of the muses, the inspirers of art, the inspirers of poetry. To see life as a poem and yourself participating in a poem is what the myth does for you.

Myths are public dreams; dreams are private myths. By finding your own dream and following it through, it will lead you to the myth-world in which you live. But just as in dream, the subject and object, though they seem to be separate, are really the same.

And so Galahad decided that it would be a disgrace to set off on a quest with the other knights. Alone he would enter the dark forest where there was no path. This is the myth of The Hero's Journey.

Without passion, men are not willing to pay any price or bear any burden to set the captives free.

This, I believe, is the great Western truth: that each of us is a completely unique creature and that, if we are ever to give any gift to the world, it will have to come out of our own experience and fulfillment of our own potentialities, not someone else's.

I am Shiva-this is the great meditation of the yogis in the Himalayas...Hea ven and hell are within us, and all the gods are within us. This is the great realization of the Upanishads of India in the ninth century B.C. All the gods, all the heavens, all the worlds, are within us. They are magnified dreams, and dreams are manifestations in image form of the energies of the body in conflict with each other.

Oh my God, does art engender humanity? It awakens your humanity. But humanity has nothing to do with political theory. Political theory is in the interests of one group of humanity, or one ideal for humanity. But humanity-my heavens, that's what proper art renders. We have a paradox. Going into the deepest aspects of inner space connects you with something that is the most vital for the outer realm.

There have been systems of religion where the mother is the prime parent, the source, and she's really a more immediate parent than the father, because one is born from the mother...so that the image of the woman is the image of the world.

Do what gives you bliss.

People who don't have a concept of the whole can do very unfortunate things.

You can't have creativity unless you leave behind the bounded, the fixed, all the rules

Both the artist and the lover know that perfection is not loveable. It is the clumsiness of a fault that makes a person lovable.

Revolution doesn't have to do with smashing something, it has to do with bringing something forth. If you spend all your time thinking about that which you are attacking, then you are negatively bound to it. You have to find the zeal in yourself and bring that out.

When you go through life ... it all seems accidental at the time it is happening. Then when you get on in your 60s or 70s and look back, your life looks like a well-planned novel with a coherent theme ... Incidents that seemed accidental, pure chance, turn out to be major elements in the structuring of this novel. Schopenhauer says, 'Who wrote this novel? You did.'

[M]yths are not invented as stories are. Myths are inspired-they really are. They come from the same realm that dream comes from.

Eternity is not future or past. Eternity is a dimension of now. It is a dimension of the human spirit -- which is eternal. Find that eternal dimension in yourself, and you will ride through time, and throughout the whole length of your days.

The Deadheads are doing the dance of life and this I would say is the answer to the atom bomb.

Well, 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.

Nothing is exciting if you know what the outcome is going to be.

Truth is one, the sages speak of it by many names.

Mythological symbols touch and exhilarate centers of life beyond the reach of vocabularies of reason and coercion.

If you follow your bliss...the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living.

The myth is the public domain and the dream is the private myth. If your private myth, your dream, happens to coincide with that of the society, you are in good accord with your group. If it isn't, you've got a long adventure in the dark forest ahead of you.

Life has no meaning. Each of us has meaning and we bring it to life. It is a waste to be asking the question when you are the answer.

We are kept out of the Garden by our own fear and desire in relation to what we think to be the goods of our life.

If you want resurrection, you must have crucifixion... The hoarder, the one in us that wants to keep, to hold on, must be killed.

There is an Indian fable of three beings who drank from a river: one was a god, and he drank ambrosia; one was a man, and he drank water; and one was a demon, and he drank filth. What you get is a function of your own consciousness.

Your own path you make with every step you take. That's why it's your path.

Economics and politics are the governing powers of life today, and that's why everything is so screwy.

To find your own way is to follow your bliss.

The entire heavenly realm is within us, but to find it we have to relate to what's outside.

Myth is much more important and true than history. History is just journalism and you know how reliable that is.

We are all born as animals and live the life that animals live: we sleep, eat, reproduce, and fight. There is, however, another order of living, which the animals do not know, that of awe before the mystery of being ... that can be the root and branch of the spiritual sense of one’s days. That is the birth - the Virgin Birth - in the heart of a properly human, spiritual life.

There is no greater privilege in life than being yourself.

Not all who hesitate are lost. The psyche has many secrets in reserve. And these are not disclosed unless required.

When everything is lost, and all seems darkness, then comes the new life and all that is needed.