110+ Joseph Campbell Quotes On Death, Storytelling And Mythology

Joseph Campbell was an American author, lecturer, and professor of literature who is best known for his work in the fields of comparative mythology and comparative religion. He is known for his famous work, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, which looks at the common themes found in mythology and various world religions. His work has had an immense influence on modern popular culture, particularly in the fields of film, television, and literature. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Joseph Campbell on life, love, death.

Top 10 Joseph Campbell Quotes

1. We must let go of the life we have planned, so as to accept the one that is waiting for us.
2. I don't believe people are looking for the meaning of life as much as they are looking for the experience of being alive.
3. If the path before you is clear, you're probably on someone else's.
4. All the gods, all the heavens, all the hells, are within you.
5. 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.
6. Find a place inside where there's joy, and the joy will burn out the pain.
7. Follow your bliss.
8. When you make the sacrifice in marriage, you're sacrificing not to each other but to unity in a relationship.
9. Life is not a problem to be solved but a mystery to be lived. Follow the path that is no path, follow your bliss.
10. A hero is someone who has given his or her life to something bigger than oneself.

Joseph Campbell Image Quotes

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

Follow your bliss. — Joseph Campbell

Your sacred space is where you can find yourself again and again. — Joseph Campbell

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

At the darkest moment comes the light. — Joseph Campbell

The old skin has to be shed before the new one can come. — Joseph Campbell

Joseph Campbell Short Quotes

• Your sacred space is where you can find yourself again and again.
• At the darkest moment comes the light.
• The old skin has to be shed before the new one can come.
• Computers are like Old Testament gods; lots of rules and no mercy.
• Art is the set of wings to carry you out of your own entanglement.
• The dark night of the soul comes just before revelation.
• Where you stumble and fall, there you will find gold.
• When everything is lost, and all seems darkness, then comes the new life and all that is needed.
• If you are on the right path you will find that invisible hands are helping.
• Midlife is when you reach the top of the ladder and find that it was against the wrong wall.

Joseph Campbell Quotes About Life

It is by going down into the abyss that we recover the treasures of life. Where you stumble, there lies your treasure. — Joseph Campbell

One way or another, we all have to find what best fosters the flowering of our humanity in this contemporary life, and dedicate ourselves to that. — Joseph Campbell

The goal of life is to make your heartbeat match the beat of the universe, to match your nature with Nature. — Joseph Campbell

Suddenly you’re ripped into being alive. And life is pain, and life is suffering, and life is horror, but my god you’re alive and its spectacular. — 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

As Freud has shown, blunders are not the merest chance. They are the result of suppressed desires and conflicts. They are ripples on the surface of life, produced by unsuspected springs. And these may be very deep - as deep as the soul itself. The blunder may amount to the opening of a destiny. — Joseph Campbell

Opportunities to find deeper powers within ourselves come when life seems most challenging. — Joseph Campbell

We must be willing to get rid of the life we've planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us. The old skin has to be shed before the new one can come. - — Joseph Campbell

Life is without meaning. You bring the meaning to it. The meaning of life is whatever you ascribe it to be. Being alive is the meaning. — Joseph Campbell

Your life is the fruit of your own doing. You have no one to blame but yourself. — Joseph Campbell

Joseph Campbell Quotes About Love

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. — Joseph Campbell

When people get married because they think it's a long-time love affair, they'll be divorced very soon, because all love affairs end in disappointment. But marriage is a recognition of a spiritual identity. — Joseph Campbell

It is within you that the divine lives. — Joseph Campbell

The Greeks, it will be recalled, regarded Eros, the god of love, as the eldest of the gods; but also as the youngest, born fresh and dewy-eyed in every living heart. — Joseph Campbell

Love your enemies, for they determine who you are. — Joseph Campbell

Love is the burning point of life, and since all life is sorrowful, so is love. The stronger the love, the more the pain. Love itself is pain, you might say -the pain of being truly alive. — Joseph Campbell

The principle of compassion is that which converts disillusionment into a participatory companionship. This is the basic love, the charity, that turns a critic into a living human being who has something to give to - as well as to demand of - the world. — Joseph Campbell

Love is perfect kindness. — 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

The seizure of passionate love can be, in such a context, only illicit, breaking in upon the order of one's dutiful life in virtue as a devastating storm. — Joseph Campbell

Joseph Campbell Quotes About Death

The eternal principle, which never was born, never will die: it is in all things: it is in you now. You are the wave on the face of the ocean. When the wave is gone, is the water gone? Has anything happened? Nothing has happened. It is a play, a game, a dance. — Joseph Campbell

Life lives on life. This is the sense of the symbol of the Ouroboros, the serpent biting its tail. Everything that lives lives on the death of something else. Your own body will be food for something else. Anyone who denies this, anyone who holds back, is out of order. Death is an act of giving. — Joseph Campbell

The last act in the biography of the hero is that of the death or departure. — Joseph Campbell

Life is but a mask worn on the face of death. And is death, then, but another mask? 'How many can say,' asks the Aztec poet, 'that there is, or is not, a truth beyond?' — Joseph Campbell

One can experience an unconditional affirmation of life only when one has accepted death, not as contrary to life, but as an aspect of it. — Joseph Campbell

Mythology is the womb of mankind's initiation to life and death. — Joseph Campbell

Joseph Campbell Quotes About Mythology

Eternity is not future or past. Eternity is a dimension of now. — Joseph Campbell

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

Myths are public dreams, dreams are private myths. — Joseph Campbell

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. — 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

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

If you want to change the world, you have to change the metaphor. — Joseph Campbell

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

Myths are clues to the spiritual potentialities of the human life. — Joseph Campbell

Joseph Campbell Quotes About Religion

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

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

We know that Jesus could not have ascended to heaven because there is no physical heaven anywhere in the universe. Even ascending at the speed of light, Jesus would still be in the galaxy. — Joseph Campbell

Mythologies, in other words, mythologies and religions are great poems and, when recognized as such, point infallibly through things and events to the ubiquity of a — Joseph Campbell

Every religion, every mythology is true in this sense: It is true as metaphorical of the human and cosmic mystery. — Joseph Campbell

Myth is what we call other people's religion. — Joseph Campbell

What gods are there, what gods have there ever been, that were not from man's imagination? — Joseph Campbell

A one sentence definition of mythology? Mythology is what we call someone else's religion. — Joseph Campbell

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. — Joseph Campbell

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. (8) — Joseph Campbell

Joseph Campbell Quotes About Hero's Journey

For we have not even to risk the adventure alone, for the heros of all time have gone before us. — Joseph Campbell

Regrets are illuminations come too late. — Joseph Campbell

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

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. — Joseph Campbell

You enter the forest at the darkest point, where there is no path. Where there is a way or 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

A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder. Fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won. — 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

If you follow someone else's way, you are not going to realize your potential. — Joseph Campbell

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

Breaking out is following your bliss pattern, quitting the old place, starting your hero journey, following your bliss. You throw off yesterday as the snake sheds its skin. — Joseph Campbell

Joseph Campbell Quotes About Time

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. — Joseph Campbell

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. — Joseph Campbell

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

You must have a room, or a certain hour or so a day, where you don't know what was in the newspapers that morning a place where you can simply experience and bring forth what you are and what you might be. — Joseph Campbell

Life is a guy trying to play a violin solo in public, while learning the music and his instrument at the same time. — Joseph Campbell

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

When you no longer are compelled by desire and fear . . . when you have seen the radiance in eternity from all forms of time . . . when you follow your bliss . . . doors will open where you would not have thought there were doors . . . and the world will step in and help. — Joseph Campbell

How teach again, however, what has been taught correctly and incorrectly learned a thousand thousand times, throughout the millenniums of mankind's prudent folly? That is the hero's ultimate difficult task. — Joseph Campbell

Myths are so intimately bound to culture, time, and place that unless the symbols, the metaphors, are kept alive by constant recreation through the arts, the life just slips away from them. — 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

Joseph Campbell Quotes About Heroes

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

The adventure of the hero is the adventure of being alive — Joseph Campbell

The achievement of the hero is one that he is ready for and it's really a manifestation of his character. It's amusing the way in which the landscape and conditions of the environment match the readiness of the hero. The adventure that he is ready for is the one that he gets. — Joseph Campbell

A hero is not a champion of things become, but of things becoming; the dragon to be slain by him is precisely the monster of the status quo. — Joseph Campbell

You are the Hero of your own Story. — Joseph Campbell

Whether you call someone a hero or a monster is all relative to where the focus of your consciousness may be. — 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

But the makers of legend have seldom rested content to regard the world's great heroes as mere human beings who broke past the horizons that limited their fellows and returned such boons as any man with equal faith and courage might have found. — Joseph Campbell

There is what I would call the hero journey, the night sea journey, the hero quest, where the individual is going to bring forth in his life something that was never beheld before. — Joseph Campbell

Every hero must have the courage to be alone, to take the journey for himself. — Joseph Campbell

Joseph Campbell Quotes About Stories

If you're going to have a story, have a big story, or none at all. — 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

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

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

Everything starts with a story. — Joseph Campbell

Every story you tell is your own story. — Joseph Campbell

Joseph Campbell Quotes About Symbolism

We keep thinking of deity as a kind of fact, somewhere; God as a fact. God is simply our own notion of something that is symbolic of transcendence and mystery. The mystery is what’s important. — Joseph Campbell

This is an important point about symbols: they do not refer to historical events; they refer through historical events to spiritual or psychological principles and powers that are of yesterday, today, and tomorrow, and that are everywhere. — Joseph Campbell

It has always been the prime function of mythology and rite to supply the symbols that carry the human spirit forward. — Joseph Campbell

When you see the earth from the moon, you don't see any divisions there of nations or states. This might be the symbol, really, for the new mythology to come. That is the country that we are going to be celebrating. And those are the people that we are one with. — Joseph Campbell

Myths are the world's dreams. They are archetypal dreams and deal with great human problems. Myths and dreams come from the same place. They come from realizations of some kind that then have to find expression in symbolic form. — Joseph Campbell

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

Every myth is psychologically symbolic. Its narratives and images are to be read, therefore, not literally, but as metaphors. — Joseph Campbell

The function of (heroic) symbols is to give you a sense of Aha! Yes, I know what it is, it's myself. — Joseph Campbell

Joseph Campbell Quotes About Adventure

Follow your bliss. The heroic life is living the individual adventure. There is no security in following the call to adventure. Nothing is exciting if you know what the outcome is going to be. — Joseph Campbell

The big question is whether you are going to be able to say a hearty yes to your adventure. — Joseph Campbell

Questing... is not an ego trip; it is an adventure to bring into fulfillment your gift to the world, which is yourself. — Joseph Campbell

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. — Joseph Campbell

The conquest of fear yields the courage of life. That is the cardinal initiation of every heroic adventure-- fearlessness and achievement. — Joseph Campbell

The senses are a kind of reason. Taste, touch and smell, hearing and seeing, are not merely a means to sensation, enjoyable or otherwise, but they are also a means to knowledge - and are, indeed, your only actual means to knowledge. — Joseph Campbell

The adventure evoked a quality of his character that he didn't know he possessed. — Joseph Campbell

Follow your bliss. The heroic life is living the individual adventure. — Joseph Campbell

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. — Joseph Campbell

There is no security in following the call to adventure. — Joseph Campbell

Joseph Campbell Quotes About Experience

I think of compassion as the fundamental religious experience and, unless that is there, you have nothing. — Joseph Campbell

Change the focus of the eye. When you have done that, then the end of the world as you formerly knew it will have occurred, and you will experience the radiance of the divine presence everywhere, here and now. — Joseph Campbell

You know, when real trouble comes your humanity is awakened. The fundamental human experience is that of compassion. — Joseph Campbell

God is the experience of looking at a tree and saying, 'Ah! — Joseph Campbell

The goal of life is rapture. Art is the way we experience it. — Joseph Campbell

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. — Joseph Campbell

What we are really living for is the experience of life, both the pain and the pleasure. — Joseph Campbell

[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

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

The experience of Eternity right here and now, is the function of life. — Joseph Campbell

Joseph Campbell Quotes About Alive

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

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

He said myths and mythology wasn't to give meaning to life but to give us an experience of life, an experience of vitality in being alive. — Joseph Campbell

We're all seeking...the rapture of being alive. — Joseph Campbell

For people who are really alive to have life awakened is more important than to get a sandwich. — Joseph Campbell

You yourself are participating in the evil, or you are not alive. Whatever you do is evil for somebody. This is one of the ironies of the whole creation. — Joseph Campbell

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

I don’t think people are really seeking the meaning of Life. I think we’re seeking an experience of being alive…we want to feel the rapture of being alive — Joseph Campbell

Joseph Campbell Quotes About People

It takes courage to do what you want. Other people have a lot of plans for you... Follow your bliss. — Joseph Campbell

The world is full of people who have stopped listening to themselves. — Joseph Campbell

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

The theme of the Grail is the bringing of life into what is known as 'the wasteland.' The wasteland is the preliminary theme to which the Grail is the answer. . . It's the world of people living inauthentic lives - doing what they are supposed to do. — 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

I always feel uncomfortable when people speak about ordinary mortals because I've never met an ordinary man, woman or child. — Joseph Campbell

Preachers err by trying to talk people into belief; better they reveal the radiance of their own discovery. — Joseph Campbell

When you follow your bliss, you begin to meet people who are in the field of your bliss, and they open the doors to you. — Joseph Campbell

Every people is a chosen people in its own mind. And it is rather amusing that their name for themselves usually means mankind. — Joseph Campbell

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

Joseph Campbell Quotes About Universe

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

The notion of this universe, its heavens, hells, and everything within it, as a great dream dreamed by a single being in which all the dream characters are dreaming too, has in India enchanted and shaped the entire civilization. — Joseph Campbell

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

Chief Seattle, of the Indians that inhabited the Seattle area, wrote a wonderful paper that has to do with putting oneself in tune with the universe. He said, — 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

What you have to do, you do with play. The universe is God’s play. — Joseph Campbell

In choosing your god, you choose your way of looking at the universe. There are plenty of Gods. Choose yours. — Joseph Campbell

Poetry comes out of an elite experience, the experience of people whose ears are opened to the song of the universe. — Joseph Campbell

Joseph Campbell Famous Quotes And Sayings

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

Follow your bliss. — Joseph Campbell

The hero’s journey always begins with the call. One way or another, a guide must come to say, 'Look, you’re in Sleepy Land. Wake. Come on a trip. There is a whole aspect of your consciousness, your being, that’s not been touched. So you’re at home here? Well, there’s not enough of you there.' And so it starts. — Joseph Campbell

The way to find out about your happiness is to keep your mind on those moments when you feel most happy, when you really are happy-not excited, not just thrilled, but deeply happy. This requires a little bit of self analysis. What is it that makes you happy? Stay with it, no matter what people tell you. This is what I call "following your bliss." — Joseph Campbell

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

At the darkest moment comes the light. — Joseph Campbell

The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek. Fear of the unknown is our greatest fear. Many of us would enter a tiger's lair before we would enter a dark cave. While caution is a useful instinct, we lose many opportunities and much of the adventure of life if we fail to support the curious explorer within us. — Joseph Campbell

When we quit thinking primarily about ourselves and our own self-preservation, we undergo a truly heroic transformation of consciousness. — Joseph Campbell

No one in the world was ever you before, with your particular gifts and abilities and possibilities. — Joseph Campbell

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

I don’t think there is any such thing as an ordinary mortal. Everybody has his own possibility of rapture in the experience of life. All he has to do is recognize it and then cultivate it and get going with it. I always feel uncomfortable when people speak about ordinary mortals because I’ve never met an ordinary man, woman, or child. — Joseph Campbell

The night of December 25, to which date the Nativity of Christ was ultimately assigned, was exactly that of the birth of the Persian savior Mithra, who, as an incarnation of eternal light, was born the night of the winter solstice (then dated December 25) at midnight, the instant of the turn of the year from increasing darkness to light. — 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

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

The old skin has to be shed before the new one can come. — Joseph Campbell

Our demons are our own limitations, which shut us off from the realization of the ubiquity of the spirit . . . each of these demons is conquered in a vision quest. — Joseph Campbell

There is no make-believe about heaven, future bliss, and compensation, to alleviate the bitter majesty, but only utter darkness, the void of unfulfillment, to receive and eat back the lives that have been tossed forth from the womb only to fail. — Joseph Campbell

Perfection isn't human. Human beings are not perfect. What evokes our love--and I mean love, not lust--is the imperfection of the human being. So, when the imperfection of the real person peaks through, say, 'This is a challenge to my compassion.' Then make a try, and something might begin to get going. — 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

You may have success in life, but then just think of it - what kind of life was it? What good was it - you've never done the thing you wanted to do in all your life. I always tell my students, go where your body and soul want to go. When you have the feeling, then stay with it, and don't let anyone throw you off. — 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 demon that you can swallow gives you it’s power, and the greater life’s pain, the greater life’s reply. — Joseph Campbell

Writer’s block results from too much head. Cut off your head. Pegasus, poetry, was born of Medusa when her head was cut off. You have to be reckless when writing. Be as crazy as your conscience allows. — Joseph Campbell

When we talk about settling the world's problems, we're barking up the wrong tree. The world is perfect. It's a mess. It has always been a mess. We're not going to change it. Our job is to straighten out our own lives. — Joseph Campbell

Marriage is not a love affair. A love affair has to do with immediate personal satisfaction. Marriage is an ordeal; it means yielding, time and again. That's why it's a sacrament; You give up your personal simplicity to participate in a relationship. And when you're giving, you're not giving to the other person; you're giving to the relationship. — Joseph Campbell

There are something like 18 billion cells in the brain alone. There are no two brains alike; there are no two hands alike; there are no two human beings alike. You can take your instructions and your guidance from others, but you must find your own path. — Joseph Campbell

The key to the Grail is compassion, 'suffering with,' feeling another's sorrow as if it were your own. The one who finds the dynamo of compassion is the one who's found the Grail. — Joseph Campbell

Out of perfection nothing can be made. Every process involves breaking something up. The earth must be broken to bring forth life. If the seed does not die there is no plant. Bread results from the death of wheat. Life lives on lives. Our own life lives on the acts of other people. If you are lifeworthy, you can take it. — Joseph Campbell

I have found that you have only to take that one step toward the gods, and they will then take ten steps toward you. That step, the heroic first step of the journey, is out of, or over the edge of, your boundaries, and it often must be taken before you know that you will. — Joseph Campbell

The warrior’s approach is to say ‘yes’ to life: ‘yes’ to it all. — Joseph Campbell

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

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. — Joseph Campbell

‎"Make your god transparent to the transcendent, and it doesn't matter what his name is." — Joseph Campbell

The function of the society is to cultivate the individual. It is not the function of the individual to support society. — Joseph Campbell

It's a shame to waste [the uniqueness that is you], by doing what someone else has done. — 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...that source of eternal energy is here, in you, now. — Joseph Campbell

There's nothing you can do that's more important than being fulfilled. You become a sign, you become a signal, transparent to transcendence; in this way, you will find, live, and become a realization of your own personal myth. — Joseph Campbell

Passion will move men beyond themselves, beyond their shortcomings, beyond their failures. — Joseph Campbell

Shakespeare said that art is a mirror held up to nature. And that’s what it is. The nature is your nature, and all of these wonderful poetic images of mythology are referring to something in you. When your mind is trapped by the image out there so that you never make the reference to yourself, you have misread the image. — Joseph Campbell

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

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

When you follow your bliss a kind of track opens up, that's always been there, waiting for you. And the life that you should be living, is the one that you will be living. — Joseph Campbell

There is perhaps nothing worse than reaching the top of the ladder and discovering that you’re on the wrong wall. — 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

For when the heart insists on its destiny, resisting the general blandishment, then the agony is great; so too the danger. Forces, however, will have been set in motion beyond the reckoning of the senses. Sequences of events from the corners of the world will draw gradually together, and miracles of coincidence bring the inevitable to pass. — Joseph Campbell

In meditating, meditate on your own divinity. The goal of life is to be a vehicle for something higher. Keep your eyes up there between the world of opposites watching your 'play' in the world.Let the world be as it is and learn to rock with the waves. — Joseph Campbell

Gods suppressed become devils, and often it is these devils whom we first encounter when we turn inward. — Joseph Campbell

If marriage isn't a first priority in your life, you're not married. — Joseph Campbell

Participate joyfully in the sorrows of the world. We cannot cure the world of sorrows, but we can choose to live in joy. — Joseph Campbell

Don't do anything that isn't play — Joseph Campbell

The rise and fall of civilizations in the long, broad course of history can be seen to have been largely a function of the integrity and cogency of their supporting canons of myth; for not authority but aspiration is the motivator, builder, and transformer of civilization. — 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

If you follow your bliss, doors will open for you that wouldn't have opened for anyone else. — 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

Life Lessons by Joseph Campbell

1. Joseph Campbell teaches us to follow our bliss and to find our own unique path in life. He encourages us to be courageous in the face of adversity and to never give up on our dreams.
2. He also emphasizes the importance of understanding our own personal mythology and the power of storytelling to help us make sense of the world.
3. Finally, Campbell reminds us to be open to change and to embrace the unknown, as it often leads to the greatest rewards.