Joseph Campbell Quotes

in America we have people from all kinds of backgrounds, all in a cluster, together, and consequently law has become very important in this country. Lawyers and law are what hold us together. There is no ethos.

~ Joseph Campbell

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

To call up modern versions of the old stories, one has to go forth and live life. As a result then, one will have the challenge of not only living the story, taking it all in, but also interpreting it in whatever ways are useful. So too, one will reap the reward of telling all about it afterward. One's interest in the world, and in having experiences, is really an interest in hearing, having, living one more story, and then one more, then one more story, till one cannot live them out loud any longer. Perhaps it should be said that the drive to live out stories is as deep in the psyche, when awakened, as it is compelling to the psyche to listen to stories and learn from them. Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Ph.D. in Introduction to the 2004 edition of The hero with a thousand faces (J.Campbell)

~ 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

Every moment is utterly unique and will not be continued in eternity. This fact gives life its poignancy and should concentrate your attention on what you are experiencing now.

~ 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

Society has provided [children] no rituals by which they become members of the tribe, of the community. All children need to be twice born, to learn to function rationally in the present world, leaving childhood behind.

~ Joseph Campbell

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

~ Joseph Campbell

A mythological image that has to be explained to the brain is not working.

~ Joseph Campbell

Myth must be kept alive. The people who can keep it alive are the artists of one kind or another.

~ Joseph Campbell

[Comedies], in the ancient world, were regarded as of a higher rank than tragedy, of a deeper truth, of a more difficult realization, of a sounder structure, and of a revelation more complete. The happy ending of the fairy tale, the myth, and the divine comedy of the soul, is to be read, not as a contradiction, but as a transcendence of the universal tragedy of man.... Tragedy is the shattering of the forms and of our attachments to the forms; comedy, the wild and careless, inexhaustible joy of life invincible.

~ Joseph Campbell

The fundamental human experience is that of compassion.

~ Joseph Campbell

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

~ Joseph Campbell

The imitation of Christ is the joyful participation in the sorrows of the world.

~ 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

The boy answers, Don't ask unless you are willing to be hurt.Indra says, I ask. Teach. (That, by the way, is a good Oriental idea: you don't teach until you are asked. You don't force your mission down people's throats.)

~ Joseph Campbell

There were formerly horizons within which people lived and thought and mythologized. 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. And so we are right now in an extremely perilous age of thunder, lightning, and hurricanes all around. I think it is improper to become hysterical about it, projecting hatred and blame. It is an inevitable, altogether natural thing that when energies that have never met before come into collision—each bearing its own pride—there should be turbulence. That is just what we are experiencing; and we are riding it: riding it to a new age, a new birth, a totally new condition of mankind—to which no one anywhere alive today can say that he has the key, the answer, the prophecy, to its dawn. Nor is there anyone to condemn here (”Judge not, that you may not be judged!”). What is occurring is completely natural, as are its pains, confusions, and mistakes.

~ Joseph Campbell

When you don't have a job (requiring reading) and you are doing your own reading you've got deep psychological questions. As deep as those of a little boy.

~ Joseph Campbell

Reading what you want, and having one book lead to the next, is the way I found my discipline.

~ Joseph Campbell

The hero, the waker of his own soul, is himself but the convenient means of his own dissolution.

~ Joseph Campbell

I would say that all our sciences are the material that has to be mythologized. A mythology gives spiritual import - what one might call rather the psychological, inward import, of the world of nature round about us, as understood today. There's no real conflict between science and religion ... What is in conflict is the science of 2000 BC ... and the science of the 20th century AD.

~ Joseph Campbell

The problem of the hero is to pierce himself (and therewith his world) precisely through that point, to shatter and annihilate that key knot of his limited existence.

~ Joseph Campbell

Poets are simply those who have made a profession ans a lifestyle of being in touch with their bliss.

~ Joseph Campbell

Mythology is not a lie, mythology is poetry, it is metaphorical. It has been well said that mythology is the penultimate truth--penultimate because the ultimate cannot be put into words. It is beyond words. Beyond images, beyond that bounding rim of the Buddhist Wheel of Becoming. Mythology pitches the mind beyond that rim, to what can be known but not told.

~ 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 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

Humor is the touchstone of the truly mythological as distinct from the more literal-minded and sentimental theological mood.

~ Joseph Campbell

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

~ Joseph Campbell

When a judge walks into the room, and everybody stands up, you’re not standing up to that guy, you’re standing up to the robe that he’s wearing and the role that he’s going to play. What makes him worthy of that role is his integrity, as a representative of the principles of that role, and not some group of prejudices of his own. So what you’re standing up to is a mythological character. I imagine some kings and queens are the most stupid, absurd, banal people you could run into, probably interested only in horses and women, you know. But you’re not responding to them as personalities, you’re responding to them in their mythological roles. When someone becomes a judge, or President of the United States, the man is no longer that man, he’s the representative of an eternal office; he has to sacrifice his personal desires and even life possibilities to the role that he now signifies.

~ Joseph Campbell

Wherever the poetry of myth is interpreted as biography, history, or science, it is killed. The living images become only remote facts of a distant time or sky. Furthermore, it is never difficult to demonstrate that as science and history mythology is absurd. When a civilization begins to reinterpret its mythology in this way, the life goes out of it, temples become museums, and the link between the two perspectives is dissolved. Such a blight has certainly descended on the Bible and on a great part of the Christian cult.To bring the images back to life, one has to seek, not interesting applications to modern affairs, but illuminating hints from the inspired past. When these are found, vast areas of half-dead iconography disclose again their permanently human meaning.

~ Joseph Campbell

One finds the same basic mythological themes in all the religions of the world, from the most primitive to the most sophisticated, from the North American plains to European forests to Polynesian atolls. The imagery of myth is a language, a lingua franca that expresses something basic about our deepest humanity. It is variously inflected in its various provinces.

~ Joseph Campbell

In marriage you are not sacrificing yourself to the other person. You are sacrificing yourself to the relationship.

~ Joseph Campbell

Life will always be sorrowful. We can't change it, but we can change our attitude toward it.

~ Joseph Campbell

One great thing about growing old is that nothing is going to lead to anything. Everything is of the moment.

~ Joseph Campbell

Awe is what moves us forward.

~ Joseph Campbell

In marriage you are not sacrificing yourself to the other person. You are sacrificing yourself to the relationship.You become mature when you become the authority of your own life.Life will always be sorrowful. We can't change it, but we can change our attitude toward it.Awe is what moves us forward.

~ Joseph Campbell

The psychotic drowns in the same waters in which the mystic swims with delight.

~ Joseph Campbell

The LSD phenomenon, on the other hand, is—to me at least—more interesting. It is an intentionally achieved schizophrenia, with the expectation of a spontaneous remission—which, however, does not always follow. Yoga, too, is intentional schizophrenia: one breaks away from the world, plunging inward, and the ranges of vision experienced are in fact the same as those of a psychosis. But what, then, is the difference? What is the difference between a psychotic or LSD experience and a yogic, or a mystical? The plunges are all into the same deep inward sea; of that there can be no doubt. The symbolic figures encountered are in many instances identical (and I shall have something more to say about those in a moment). But there is an important difference. The difference—to put it sharply—is equivalent simply to that between a diver who can swim and one who cannot. The mystic, endowed with native talents for this sort of thing and following, stage by stage, the instruction of a master, enters the waters and finds he can swim; whereas the schizophrenic, unprepared, unguided, and ungifted, has fallen or has intentionally plunged, and is drowning.

~ Joseph Campbell

For the bliss of the deep abode is not lightly abandoned in favor of the self-scattering of the wakened state

~ Joseph Campbell

Only birth can conquer death—the birth , not of the old thing again, but of something new .

~ Joseph Campbell