Joseph Campbell Quotes & Sayings

We save the world by being alive ourselves. — Joseph Campbell

Willed introversion, in fact, is one of the classic implements of creative genius and can be employed as a deliberate device. — Joseph Campbell

People forget facts, but they remember stories. — Joseph Campbell

Myth is the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human manifestation ... — Joseph Campbell

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

You are more than you think you are. There are dimensions of your being and a potential for realization and consciousness that are not included in your concept of yourself. Your life is much deeper and broader than you conceive it to be here. What you are living is but a fractional inkling of what is really within you, what gives you life, breadth, and depth. — Joseph Campbell

If you can see your path laid out in front of you step by step, you know it's not your path. Your own path you make with every step you take. That's why it's your path. — Joseph Campbell

The hero, whether god or goddess, man or woman, the figure in a myth or the dreamer of a dream discovers and assimilates his opposite (his own unsuspected self) either by swallowing it or by being swallowed. — Joseph Campbell

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

Once you know the difference between right and wrong, you have lots fewer decisions to make. — Joseph Campbell

The battlefield is symbolic of the field of life, where every creature lives on the death of another. A realization of the inevitable guilt of life may so sicken the heart, that like Hamlet, or like Arjuna, one may refuse to go on with it. On the other hand, like most of the rest of us, one may invent a false finally unjustified image of oneself as an exceptional phenomenon in the world
not guilty as others are, but justified in one's inevitable sinning, because one represents the good. Such self-righteousness leads to a misunderstanding, not only of oneself, but of the nature of both Man and the Cosmos. The goal of the myth is to dispel the need for such life-ignorance by affecting a reconciliation of the individual consciousness with the universal will, and this is affected through a realization of the true relationship of the passing phenomena of time to the imperishable life that lives and dies in all. — Joseph Campbell

When you realize that eternity is right here now, that it is within your possibility to experience the eternity of your own truth and being, then you grasp the following: That which you are was never born and will never die ... (90) — Joseph Campbell

If you see your path laid out in front of you - Step one, Step two, Step three - you only know one thing ... it is not your path. Your path is created in the moment of action. If you can see it laid out in front of you, you can be sure it is someone else's path. That is why you see it so clearly. — Joseph Campbell

The world is full of people who have stopped listening to themselves or have listened only to their neighbors to learn what they ought to do, how they ought to behave, and what the values are they should be living for. — Joseph Campbell

Follow your bliss and doors will open where there were no doors before. — Joseph Campbell

One of our problems today is that we are not well acquainted with the literature of the spirit. We re interested in the news of the day and the problems of the hour. — Joseph Campbell

Love thine enemies because they are the instruments of your destiny. — Joseph Campbell

Don't think of what's being said, but of what's talking. Malice? Ignorance? Pride? Love? The goal of the hero's journey is yourself, finding yourself. — Joseph Campbell

Within the field of a secular society, which is a sort of neutral frame that allows individuals to develop their own lives, so long as they don't annoy their neighbors too much, each of us has an individual myth that's driving us, which we may or may not know. — Joseph Campbell

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

When a spider makes a beautiful web, the beauty comes out of the spider's nature. It's instinctive beauty. How much of the beauty of our own lives is about the beauty of being alive? — Joseph Campbell

We must let go of the life we have planned, so as to accept the one that is waiting for us. — Joseph Campbell

The call to adventure signifies that destiny has summoned the hero. — Joseph Campbell

The spirit is the bouquet of nature. — Joseph Campbell

When an idea is important to a person or culture it will find its way into imagery. — Joseph Campbell

In the absence of an effective general mythology, each of us has his private, unrecognized, rudimentary, yet secretly potent pantheon of dreams. — Joseph Campbell

Essentially, mythologies are enormous poems that are renditions of insights, giving some sense of the marvel, the miracle and wonder of life. — Joseph Campbell

You've got to say yes to this miracle of life as it is, not on condition that it follow your rules. — Joseph Campbell

The purpose of the journey is compassion. When you have come past the pairs of opposites, you have reached compassion. — Joseph Campbell

Great is the gate and narrow is the way which leadeth to life, and few there be who find it. And — Joseph Campbell

One of the great disadvantages of a literary or scriptural tradition like the biblical one is that a deity or context of deities becomes crystallized, petrified at a certain time and place. The deity doesn't continue to grow, expand, or take into account new cultural forces and new realizations in the sciences, and the result is this make-believe conflict we have in our culture between science and religion. — Joseph Campbell

God is a metaphor for that which transcends all levels of intellectual thought. It's as simple as that. — Joseph Campbell

The experience of eternity right here and now is the function of life. Heaven is not the place to have the experience; here is the place to have the experience. — Joseph Campbell

Anyone continually knitting his life into contexts of intention, import, and clarifications of meaning will in the end find that he has lost the sense of experiencing life. — Joseph Campbell

My writing is of a very different kind from anything I've heard about. All this mythological material is out there, a big gathering of stuff, and I have been reading it for some forty- or fifty-odd years. There are various ways of handling that. The most common is to put the material together and publish a scholarly book about it. But when I'm writing, I try to get a sense of an experiential relationship to the material. In fact, I can't write unless that happens ... I don't write unless the stuff is really working on me, and my selection of material depends on what works. — Joseph Campbell

All men are capable of reason. That is the fundamental principle of democracy Because everybody's mind is capable of true knowledge, you don't have to have a special authority, or a special revelation telling you that this is the way things should be. — Joseph Campbell

To find your own way is to follow your bliss. This involves analysis, watching yourself and seeing where real deep bliss is
not the quick little excitement , but the real deep, life-filling bliss. — Joseph Campbell

The realms of the gods and demons - heaven, purgatory, hell - are of the substance of dreams. Myth, in this view, is the dream of the world. — Joseph Campbell

The water in which the mystic swims is the same water a madman drowns in. — Joseph Campbell

If we fix on the old, we get stuck. — Joseph Campbell

The One Forbidden Thing. Remember Bluebeard, who says to his wife, "Don't open that closet"? And then one always disobeys. In the Old Testament story God points out the one forbidden thing. Now, God must have known very well that man was going to eat the forbidden fruit. But it was by doing that that man became the initiator of his own life. Life really began with that act of disobedience. — Joseph Campbell

[T]here is nothing to say about life. It has no meaning. You make meaning. If you want a meaning in your life, find a meaning and bring it into your life, but life won't give you a meaning. Meaning is a concept. It is a notion of an end toward which you are going. The point of Buddhism is This Is It. — Joseph Campbell

If you live with the myths in your mind, you will find yourself always in mythological situations. They cover everything that can happen to you. And that enables you to interpret the myth in relation to life, as well as life in relation to myth. — Joseph Campbell

A myth is something that has never happened, but is happening all the time. — Joseph Campbell

The All is everywhere, and anywhere may become the seat of power. Any blade of grass may assume, in myth, the figure of the savior and conduct the questing wanderer into the sanctum sanctorum of his own heart. — Joseph Campbell

All the gods, all the heavens, all the hells, are within you. — Joseph Campbell

There was a wonderful old man [ ... ] who had a piece of property [ ... ] he would rent out for twenty dollards a year or so to any young person he thought might have a future in the arts. [ ... ]
He declared he wouldn't install running water because he didn't like the class of people it attracted. — Joseph Campbell

It is a basic idea of practically every war mythology that the enemy is a monster and that in killing him one is protecting the only truly valuable order of human life on earth, which is that, of course, of one's own people. — Joseph Campbell

This is the threat to our lives that we all face today. Is the system going to flatten you out and deny you your humanity, or are you going to be able to make use of the system to the attainment of human purposes? How do you relate to the system so that you are not compulsively serving it? It doesn't help to try to change it to accord with your system of thought. The momentum of history behind it is too great for anything really significant to evolve from that kind of action. The thing to do is learn to live in your period of history as a human being. That's something else, and it can be done. — Joseph Campbell

Mythology, in other words, is psychology misread as biography, history, and cosmology. — Joseph Campbell

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

Heinrich Zimmerhe had a little saying : The best things cant be told - because they are transcendent, inexpressible truths. The second best are misunderstood : myths, which are metaphoric attempts to point to the way toward the first. And the third best have to do with history, science, biography, and so on. The only kind of talking that can be understood is this last kind. — Joseph Campbell

When you translate the Bible with excessive literalism, you demythologize it. The possibility of a convincing reference to the individual's own spiritual experience is lost. (111) — Joseph Campbell

You have to have a feeling for where you are. You've got only one life to live and you don't have to live it for six people. Pay attention to it. — Joseph Campbell

A ritual is the enactment of a myth. And, by participating in the ritual, you are participating in the myth. And since myth is a projection of the depth wisdom of the psyche, by participating in a ritual, participating in the myth, you are being, as it were, put in accord with that wisdom, which is the wisdom that is inherent within you anyhow. Your consciousness is being re-minded of the wisdom of your own life. I think ritual is terribly important. — Joseph Campbell

The familiar life horizon has been outgrown: the old concepts, ideals, and emotional patterns no longer fit; the time for the passing of a threshold is at hand. — Joseph Campbell

Just as anyone who listens to the muse will hear, you can write out of your own intention or out of inspiration. There is such a thing. It comes up and talks. And those who have heard deeply the rhythms and hymns of the gods, can recite those hymns in such a way that the gods will be attracted. — Joseph Campbell

The world without spirit is a wasteland. People have the notion of saving the world by shifting things around, changing the rules, and who's on top, and so forth. No, no! Any world is a valid world if it's alive. The thing to do is to bring life to it, and the only way to do that is to find in your own case where the life is and become alive yourself. — Joseph Campbell

There is a condescension on the part of the infinite to the mind of man. That is what looks like God. — Joseph Campbell

I think it's important to live life with a knowledge of its mystery, and of your own mystery. — Joseph Campbell

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. — Joseph Campbell

There are now no more horizons. And with the dissolution of horizons we have experienced and are experiencing collisions, terrific collisions, not only of peoples but also of their mythologies. It is as when dividing panels are withdrawn from between chambers of very hot and very cold airs: there is a rush of these forces together. — Joseph Campbell

They've moved out of the society that would have protected them, and into the dark forest, into the world of fire, of original experience. Original experience has not been interpreted for you, and so you've got to work out your life for yourself. Either you can take it or you can't. You don't have to go far off the interpreted path to find yourself in very difficult situations. The courage to face the trials and to bring a whole new body of possibilities into the field of interpreted experience for other people to experience - that is the hero's deed. — Joseph Campbell

The passage of the mythological hero may be over ground, incidentally; fundamentally it is inward
into depths where obscure resistances are overcome, and long lost, forgotten powers are revivified, to be made available for the transfiguration of the world. — Joseph Campbell

Dream is the personalized myth, myth the depersonalized dream; both myth and dream are symbolic in the same general way of the dynamic of the psyche. But in the dream the forms are quirked by the peculiar troubles of the dreamer, whereas in myth the problems and solutions sown are directly valid for all mankind — Joseph Campbell

For if anything is capable of making a poet of a literary man, it is my hometown love of the human, the living and ordinary. — Joseph Campbell

There is a God inside my PC. An Old-Testament God with lots of arbitrary rules and utterly no mercy. — Joseph Campbell

We're in a freefall into future. We don't know where we're going. Things are changing so fast, and always when you're going through a long tunnel, anxiety comes along. And all you have to do to transform your hell into a paradise is to turn your fall into a voluntary act. It's a very interesting shift of perspective and that's all it is ... joyful participation in the sorrows and everything changes. — Joseph Campbell

We are standing on a whale fishing for minnows — Joseph Campbell

One of the most interesting histories of what comes of rejecting science we may see in Islam, which in the beginning received, accepted, and even developed the classical legacy. For some five or six rich centuries there is an impressive Islamic record of scientific thought, experiment, and research, particularly in medicine. But then, alas! the authority of the general community, the Sunna, the consensus - which Mohammed the Prophet had declared would always be right - cracked down. The Word of God in the Koran was the only source and vehicle of truth. Scientific thought led to 'loss of belief in the origin of the world and in the Creator.' And so it was that, just when the light of Greek learning was beginning to be carried from Islam to Europe - from circa 1100 onward - Islamic science and medicine came to a standstill and went dead ... — Joseph Campbell

It [music] has an awakening function. Life is a rhythm. Art is an organization of rhythms. Music is a fundamental art that touches our will system. In Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Idea he speaks of music as the sound that awakens the will. The rhythm of the music awakens certain life rhythms, ways of living and experiencing life. So it's an awakener of life. — Joseph Campbell

When you have lived your individual life in your own adventurous way and then look back upon its course, you will find that you have lived a model human life, after all. — Joseph Campbell

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

The hero journey is inside of you; tear off the veils and open the mystery of your self. — Joseph Campbell

Everything, all the time, is causing everything else. — Joseph Campbell

We're in our own world, and we're in the world that has been given us outside, and the problem is to achieve3 a harmonious relationship between the two. I come into this society, so I've got to live in terms of this society. It's ridiculous not to live in terms of this society because, unless I do, I'm not living. But I mustn't allow this society to dictate to me how I should live. One has to build up one's own system that may violate the expectations of the society, and sometimes society doesn't accept that. But the task of life is to live within the field provided by the society that is really supporting you. — Joseph Campbell

Is the system going to flatten you out and deny you your humanity, or are you going to be able to make use of the system to the attainment of human purposes? — Joseph Campbell

If you have the guts to follow the risk ... if one follows what I call one's "bliss" - the thing that really gets you deep in the gut and that you feel is your life - doors will open up ... if you follow your bliss, you'll have your bliss, whether you have money or not. — Joseph Campbell

As you proceed through life, following your own path, birds will shit on you. Don't bother to brush it off.
Getting a comedic view of your situation gives you spiritual distance.
Having a sense of humor saves you. — Joseph Campbell

If you go to a master to study and learn the techniques, you diligently follow all the instructions the master puts upon you. But then comes the time for using the rules in your own way and not being bound by them ... You can actually forget the rules because they have been assimilated. You are an artist. Your own innocence now is of one who has become an artist, who has been, as it were, transmuted ... You can't have creativity unless you leave behind the bounded, the fixed, all the rules. — Joseph Campbell

When your mind is simply trapped by the image out there so that you never make the reference to yourself, you have misread the image. — Joseph Campbell

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

And so, it seems to me, there is a critical problem indicated here, which parents and families have to face squarely: that, namely, of insuring that the signals which they are imprinting on their young are such as will attune them to, and not alienate them from, the world in which they are going to have to live; unless, of course, one is dead set on bequeathing to one's heirs one's own paranoia. More — Joseph Campbell

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. — Joseph Campbell

It may be a species of impudence to think that the way you understand God is the way God is. (60). — Joseph Campbell

The dance is the highest symbol of life itself. — Joseph Campbell

They thought that it would be a disgrace to go forth as a group. Each entered the forest at a point that he himself had chosen, where it was darkest and there was no path. If there is a path it is someone else's path and you are not on the adventure. — Joseph Campbell

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

Wherever the poetry of myth is interpreted as biography, history, or science, it is killed. — Joseph Campbell

All religions are true but none are literal. — Joseph Campbell

The society is the enemy when it imposes its structures on the individual.
On the dragon there are many scales. Every one of them says "Thou Shalt."
Kill the dragon "Thou Shalt."
When one has killed that dragon, one has become The Child. — Joseph Campbell

The usual marriage in traditional cultures was arranged for by the families. It wasn't a person-to-person decision at all ... In the Middle Ages, that was the kind of marriage that was sanctified by the Church. And so the troubadour idea of real person-to-person Amor was very dangerous ... It is in direct contradiction to the way of the Church. The word AMOR spelt backwards is ROMA, the Roman Catholic Church, which was justifying marriages that were simply political and social in their character. And so came this movement validating individual choice, what I call following your bliss. — Joseph Campbell

We're not on our journey to save the world but to save ourselves. But in doing that you save the world. The influence of a vital person vitalizes. — Joseph Campbell

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

This death to the logic of emotional commitments of our chance moment in the world of space and time, this recognition of, the shift of our emphasis to, the universal life that throbs and celebrates its victory in the very kiss of our own annihilation, this amor fati, 'love of fate,' love of the fate that is inevitably death, constitutes the experience of the tragic art ... — Joseph Campbell

Whatever the hell happens, say, 'This is what I need.' — Joseph Campbell

Life is, in its very essence and character, a terrible mystery - this whole business of living by killing and eating. But it is a childish attitude to say no to life with all its pain, to say that this is something that should not have been. — Joseph Campbell

Yahweh - a jealous god, who would hold men to himself and who turned mankind away from the Tree of Immortality, instead of leading us to it. Such a god in the Orient would be regarded as a deluding idol. — Joseph Campbell

Certainly Star Wars has a valid mythological perspective. It shows the state as a machine and asks, "Is the machine going to crush humanity or serve humanity?" Humanity comes not from the machine but from the heart. What I see in Star Wars is the same problem that Faust gives us: — Joseph Campbell

Follow your inner heart and the world moves in and helps. — Joseph Campbell