Quotes from Joseph Campbell

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

The first step to the knowledge of the wonder and mystery of life is the recognition of the monstrous nature of the earthly human realm as well as its glory, the realization that this is just how it is and that it cannot and will not be changed. Those who think they know how the universe could have been had they created it, without pain, without sorrow, without time, without death, are unfit for illumination.

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

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.

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

Instead of clearing his own heart the zealot tries to clear the world.

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

The job of an educator is to teach students to see vitality in themselves

The demon that you can swallow gives you its power, and the greater life's pain, the greater life's reply.

Not all who hesitate are lost. The psyche has many secrets in reserve. And these are not disclosed unless required.

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.

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

The black moment is the moment when the real message of transformation is going to come. At the darkest moment comes the light.

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.

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

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

You become mature when you become the authority of your own life.

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

I think the person who takes a job in order to live - that is to say, for the money [not for purpose or passion]- has turned himself into a slave.

Perhaps some of us have to go through dark and devious ways before we can find the river of peace or the highroad to the soul's destination.

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

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

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

We save the world by being alive ourselves.