Quotes from Joseph Campbell

The best part of the Western tradition has included a recognition of and respect for the individual as a living entity. The function of the society is to cultivate the individual. It is not the function of the individual to to support society.

Sentiment is an echo of violence. It's not really a vital expression.

You can keep an old tradition going only by renewing it in terms of current circumstances.

The myth is not my own; I have it from my mother. Euripides

The lines of communication between the conscious and the unconscious zones of the human psyche have all been cut, and we have been split in two.

The figure of the tyrant-monster is known to the mythologies, folk traditions, legends, and even nightmares, of the world; and his characteristics are essentially everywhere the same. He is the hoarder of the general benefit.

Eternity isn't some later time. Eternity isn't some long time. Eternity has nothing to do with time. Eternity is that dimension between here and now, where thinking and time cuts out. If you won't get it here, you won't get it anywhere

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.

Freud tells us to blame our parents for all the shortcomings of our life, and Marx tells us to blame the upper class of our society. But the only one to blame is oneself. That's the helpful thing about the Indian idea of karma. Your fate is the fruit of your own doing. You have no one to blame but yourself.

Follow your bliss and don't be afraid, and doors will open where you didn't know they were going to be.

Art brings out the grand lines of nature. Antione Bourdelle

One of the many distinctions between the celebrity and the hero, he said, is that one lives for self while the other acts to redeem society.

the ultimate experience of love is a realization that beneath the illusion of two-ness dwell identity: each is both. This realization can expand into a discovery that beneath the multitudinous individualities of the whole surrounding universe--human, animal, vegetable, even mineral--dwells identity; whereupon the love experience becomes cosmic, and the beloved who first opened the vision is magnified as the mirror of creation.

And then they eat the apple, the knowledge of the opposites.

Metaphysics yields to prehistory, which is dim and vague at first, but becomes gradually precise in detail. The heroes become less and less fabulous, until at last, in the final stages of the various local traditions, legend opens into the common daylight of recorded time.

But the mistery of the woman is no less a mystery than death. Childbirth is no less a mystery; nor the flow of the mother's milk; nor the menstrual cycle -in its accord with the moon. The creative magic of the female body is a thing of wonder in itself.

An amusing and instructive example of a great hero's abject failure will be found in the Finnish Kalevala, Runos IV–VIII, where Väinämöinen fails in his wooing, first of Aino, and then of the "maid of Pohjola." The story is much too long for the present context.

The hero is the man of self-achieved submission. But submission to what? That precisely is the riddle that today we have to ask ourselves and that it is everywhere the primary virtue and historic deed of the hero to have solved.

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.

Self-terrorized, fear-haunted, alert at every hand to meet and battle back the anticipated aggressions of his environment, which are primarily the reflections of the uncontrollable impulses to acquisition within himself, the giant of self-achieved independence is the world's messenger of disaster

The inflated ego of the tyrant is a curse to himself and his world — no matter how his affairs may seem to prosper. Self-terrorized, fear-haunted, alert at every hand to meet and battle back the anticipated aggressions of his environment, which are primarily the reflections of the uncontrollable impulses to acquisition within himself, the giant of self-achieved independence is the world's messenger of disaster

The dance posture of the God may be visualized as the symbolic syllable AUM which is the verbal equivalent of the four states of consciousness and their fields of experience. (A: waking consciousness; U: dream consciousness; M: dreamless sleep; the silence around the sacred syllable is the Unmanifest Transcendent.) The God is thus within the worshiper as well as without. p109

I will never forget the experience I had when I was in Japan, a place that never heard of the Fall and the Garden of Eden. One of the Shinto texts says that the processes of nature cannot be evil. Every natural impulse is not to be corrected but to be sublimated, to be beautified. There is a glorious interest in the beauty of nature and cooperation with nature, so that in some of those gardens you don't know where nature begins and art ends—this was a tremendous experience.

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