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Joseph Campbell Quotes | Quotes said by Joseph Campbell

  • Joseph Campbell Quote #1

    [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 Quote #2

    [T]he experience of mystery comes not from expecting it but through yielding all your programs, because your programs are based on fear and desire. Drop them and the radiance comes. (16)

  • Joseph Campbell Quote #3

    [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 Quote #4

    A bit of advice
    Given to a young Native American
    At the time of his initiation:
    As you go the way of life,
    You will see a great chasm. Jump.
    It is not as wide as you think.

  • Joseph Campbell Quote #5

    A hero is someone who has given his or her life to something bigger than oneself.

  • Joseph Campbell Quote #6

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

  • Joseph Campbell Quote #7

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

  • Joseph Campbell Quote #8

    A priest is a functionary of a social sort. The society worships certain deities in a certain way, and the priest becomes ordained as a functionary to carry out that ritual. The deity to whom he is devoted is a deity that was there before he came along. But the shaman's powers are symbolized in his own familiars, deities of his own personal experience. His authority comes out of a psychological experience, not a social ordination.

  • Joseph Campbell Quote #9

    All of the great mythologies and much of the mythic story-telling of the world are from the male point of view. When I was writing The Hero with a Thousand Faces and wanted to bring female heroes in, I had to go to the fairy tales. These were told by women to children, you know, and you get a different perspective. It was the men who got involved in spinning most of the great myths. The women were too busy; they had too damn much to do to sit around thinking about stories. [...]
    In the Odyssey, you'll see three journeys. One is that of Telemachus, the son, going in quest of his father. The second is that of the father, Odysseus, becoming reconciled and related to the female principle in the sense of male-female relationship, rather than the male mastery of the female that was at the center of the Iliad. And the third is of Penelope herself, whose journey is [...] endurance. Out in Nantucket, you see all those cottages with the widow's walk up on the roof: when my husband comes back from the sea. Two journeys through space and one through time.

  • Joseph Campbell Quote #10

    All religions are true but none are literal.

  • Joseph Campbell Quote #11

    Awe is what moves us forward.

  • Joseph Campbell Quote #12

    Computers are like Old Testament gods; lots of rules and no mercy.

  • Joseph Campbell Quote #13

    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 Quote #14

    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 Quote #15

    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.

  • Joseph Campbell Quote #16

    Find a place inside where there's joy, and the joy will burn out the pain.

  • Joseph Campbell Quote #17

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

  • Joseph Campbell Quote #18

    Follow your bliss and the universe will open doors for you where there were only walls.

  • Joseph Campbell Quote #19

    Follow your bliss and the universe will open doors where there were only walls.

  • Joseph Campbell Quote #20

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

  • Joseph Campbell Quote #21

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

  • Joseph Campbell Quote #22

    Half the people in the world think that the metaphors of their religious traditions, for example, are facts. And the other half contends that they are not facts at all. As a result we have people who consider themselves believers because they accept metaphors as facts, and we have others who classify themselves as atheists because they think religious metaphors are lies.

  • Joseph Campbell Quote #23

    Heresy is the life of a mythology and orthodoxy is the death.

  • Joseph Campbell Quote #24

    How does the ordinary person come to the transcendent? For a start, I would say, study poetry. Learn how to read a poem. You need not have the experience to get the message, or at least some indication of the message. It may come gradually. (92)

  • Joseph Campbell Quote #25

    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 Campbell Quote #26

    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 Quote #27

    I don't believe people are looking for the meaning of life as much as they are looking for the experience of being alive.

  • Joseph Campbell Quote #28

    I don't have to have faith, I have experience.

  • Joseph Campbell Quote #29

    I think the person who takes a job in order to live - that is to say, for the money - has turned himself into a slave.

  • Joseph Campbell Quote #30

    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.

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