Famous Joseph Campbell Quotes

Joseph Campbell was a professor, scholar, writer, speaker as well as mythologist form America. He keenly studied Myth and was recognized for his work in comparative religion and mythology. His work has covered diverse phases of human experience. Below is a list of some of the best quotes by Joseph Campbell.

1. “Myths are public dreams, dreams are private myths.” - Joseph Campbell
2. “Gods suppressed become devils, and often it is these devils whom we first encounter when we turn inward.” - Joseph Campbell
3. “The goal of life is to make your heartbeat match the beat of the universe to match your nature with Nature.” - Joseph Campbell
4. “We must be willing to let go of the life we planned so as to have the life that is waiting for us.” - Joseph Campbell
5. “All religions are true but none are literal.” - Joseph Campbell
6. “Follow your bliss and the universes will open doors for you where there were only walls.” - Joseph Campbell
7. “The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are.” - Joseph Campbell
8. “The fates lead him who will; him who won’t they drag.” - Joseph Campbell
9. “A hero is someone who has given his or her life to something bigger than oneself.” - Joseph Campbell
10. “The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.” - Joseph Campbell
11. “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
12. “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
13. “If you want to find out what it means to have a society without any rituals, read the New York Times.”
14. “We save the world by being alive ourselves.” - Joseph Campbell
15. “Where you stumble and fall, there you will find gold.” - Joseph Campbell
16. “Preachers err by trying to talk people into belief; better they reveal the radiance of their own discovery.” - Joseph Campbell
17. “Life is like arriving late for a movie, having to figure out what was going on without bothering everybody with a lot of questions, and then being unexpectedly called away before you find out how it ends.” - Joseph Campbell
18. “If you are falling….dive.” - Joseph Campbell
19. “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
20. “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
21. “We’re so engaged in doing things to achieve purposes of outer value that we forget the inner value, the rapture that is associated with being alive, is what it is all about.” - Joseph Campbell
22. “Regrets are illuminations come too late.” - Joseph Campbell
23. “Wherever the poetry of myth is interpreted as biography, history, or science, it is killed.” - Joseph Campbell
24. “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
25. “Myth is what we call other people’s religion.” - Joseph Campbell
26. “God is the experience of looking at a tree and saying, ‘Ah!” - Joseph Campbell
27. “Your sacred space is where you can find yourself over and over again.” - Joseph Campbell
28. “All life stinks and you must embrace that with compassion.” - Joseph Campbell
29. “Instead of clearing his own heart the zealot tries to clear the world.” - Joseph Campbell
30. “What is a god? A god is a personification of a motivating power of a value system that functions in human life and in the universe.” - Joseph Campbell
31. “The ground of being is the ground of our being, and when we simply turn outward, we see all of these little problems here and there. But, if we look inward, we see that we are the source of them all.” - Joseph Campbell
32. “I don’t have to have faith, I have experience.” - Joseph Campbell
33. “Sit in a room and read–and read and read. And read the right books by the right people. Your mind is brought onto that level, and you have a nice, mild, slow-burning rapture all the time.” - Joseph Campbell
34. “The goal of life is to make your heartbeat match the beat of the universe” - Joseph Campbell
35. “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
36. “For we have not even to risk the adventure alone, for the heros of all time have gone before us…” - Joseph Campbell
37. “Not all who hesitate are lost. The psyche has many secrets in reserve. And these are not disclosed unless required.” - Joseph Campbell
38. “The black moment is the moment when the real message of transformation is going to come. At the darkest moment comes the light.” - Joseph Campbell
39. “The demon that you can swallow gives you it’s power, and the greater life’s pain, the greater life’s reply.” - Joseph Campbell
40. “It may be a species of impudence to think that the way you understand God is the way God is.” - Joseph Campbell
41. “The big question is whether you are going to be able to say a hearty yes to your adventure.” - Joseph Campbell
42. “When you follow your bliss…doors will open where you would not have thought there would be doors, and where there wouldn’t be a door for anyone else.” - Joseph Campbell
43. “I always feel uncomfortable when people speak about ordinary mortals because I’ve never met an ordinary man, woman or child.” - Joseph Campbell
44. “Myth is much more important and true than history. History is just journalism and you know how reliable that is.” - Joseph Campbell
45. “Computers are like Old Testament gods; lots of rules and no mercy.” - Joseph Campbell
46. “People always say what we are looking for is a meaning for life…I don’t think that’s what we’re looking for. I think what we’re looking for is the experience of being alive.” - Joseph Campbell
47. “All the gods, all the heavens, all the hells, are within you.” - Joseph Campbell
48. “When we quit thinking primarily about ourselves and our own self-preservation, we undergo a truly heroic transformation of consciousness.” - Joseph Campbell
49. “The latest incarnation of Oedipus, the continued romance of Beauty and the Beast, stand this afternoon on the corner of 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue, waiting for the traffic light to change.” - Joseph Campbell
50. “The job of an educator is to teach students to see vitality in themselves.” - Joseph Campbell
51. “He must put aside his pride, his virtue, beauty and life and bow or submit to the absolutely intolerable.” - Joseph Campbell
52. “If you want to change the world, you have to change the metaphor.” - Joseph Campbell
53. “Opportunities to find deeper powers within ourselves come when life seems most challenging.” - Joseph Campbell
54. “I think it was Nietzsche who said, “Be careful lest in casting out the devils you cast out the best thing that’s in you.”” - Joseph Campbell
55. “The role of the artist I now understood as that of revealing through the world-surfaces the implicit forms of the soul, and the great agent to assist the artist was the myth.” - Joseph Campbell
56. “Myth must be kept alive. The people who can keep it alive are the artists of one kind or another.” - Joseph Campbell
57. “No one in the world was ever you before, with your particular gifts and abilities and possibilities. It’s a shame to waste those by doing what someone else has done.” - Joseph Campbell
58. “If you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track which has been there all the while waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one that you are living.” - Joseph Campbell
59. “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
60. “The ultimate dragon is within you.” - Joseph Campbell
61. “Love is a friendship set to music.” - Joseph Campbell
62. “Perhaps some of us have to go through dark and devious ways before we can find the river of peace or highroad to the soul’s destination.” - Joseph Campbell
63. “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.” - Joseph Campbell
64. “Mythology may, in a real sense, be defined as other people’s religion. And religion may, in a sense, be understood as popular misunderstanding of mythology.” - Joseph Campbell
65. “The 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.” - Joseph Campbell
66. “Eternity is not the hereafter.. this is it. If you don’t get it here, you won’t get it anywhere.” - Joseph Campbell
67. “For the bliss of the deep abode is not lightly abandoned in favor of the self-scattering of the wakened state” - Joseph Campbell
68. “And if there was no Fall, what then of the need for Redemption? What god was offended and by whom? Some especially touchy cave bear whose skull had been improperly enshrined?” - Joseph Campbell
69. “We’re so engaged in doing things to achieve purposes of outer value that we forget that the inner value, the rapture that is associated with being alive, is what it’s all about.” - Joseph Campbell
70. “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
71. “The less there is of you, the more you experience the sublime.” - Joseph Campbell
72. “People say that what we are seeking is a meaning of life. I don’t think this is what we’re really seeking. I think what we’re seeing is an experience of being alive.” - Joseph Campbell
73. “The person who thinks he has found the ultimate truth is wrong.” - Joseph Campbell
74. “Freud tells us to blame our parents for all the shortcomings of our life, Marx tells us to blame the upper class of our society. But the only one to blame is oneself.” - Joseph Campbell
75. “The dark night of the soul comes just before revelation.” - Joseph Campbell
76. “The ultimate aim of the quest must be neither release nor ecstasy for oneself, but the wisdom and the power to serve others.” - Joseph Campbell
77. “God is an intelligible sphere-a sphere known to mind, not to the senses-whose center is everywhere and whose circumference nowhere.” - Joseph Campbell
78. “I don’t believe in being interested in a subject just because it’s said to be important. I believe in being caught by it somehow.” - Joseph Campbell
79. “When everything is lost, and all seems darkness, then comes the new life and all that is needed.” - Joseph Campbell
80. “What am I? Am I the bulb that carries the light, or am I the light of which the bulb is a vehicle?” - Joseph Campbell
81. “You enter the forest at the darkest point, where there is no path. Where there is a way or a path, it is someone else’s path. You are not on your own path. If you follow someone else’s way, you are not going to realize your potential.” - Joseph Campbell

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