Quotes from Joseph Campbell

you ever think that it is this absence of the religious experience of ecstasy, of joy, this denial of transcendence in our society, that has turned so many young people to the use of drugs?

The realm of the gods is a forgotten dimension of the world we know. And the exploration of that dimension, either willingly or unwillingly, is the whole sense of the deed of the hero. The values and distinctions that in normal life seem important disappear with the terrifying assimilation of the self into what formerly was only otherness.

But if we are to grasp the full value of the materials, we must note that myths are not exactly comparable to dream. Their figures originate from the same sources -- the unconscious wells of fantasy-- and their grammar is the same, but they are not the spontaneous products of sleep. On the contrary their patterns are consciously controlled. And their understood function is to serve as powerful picture language for the communication of traditional wisdom.

From the standpoint of the Olympians, eon after eon of earthly history rolls by, revealing ever the harmonious form of the total round, so that where men see only change and death, the blessed behold immutable form, world without end. But now the problem is to maintain this cosmic standpoint in the face of an immediate earthly pain or joy.

the single hero story that seemed to be repeating itself everywhere — in the oldest Sumerian epics, in folktales from the Pacific Islands and the Siberian forests and the African savannah, in the lives of great religious heroes like Gautama ?akyam?ni and Jesus, in the case notes of psychiatric patients

Apparently the most permanent of the dispositions of the human psyche are those that derive from the fact that, of all animals, we remain the longest at the mother breast.

The adventure of the hero represents the moment in his life when he achieved illumination - the nuclear moment when, while still alive, he found and opened the road to the light beyond the dark walls of our living death

Der gewöhnliche Sterbliche ist nicht nur zufrieden, sondern geradezu stolz, daß er innerhalb der etablierten Grenzen bleibt, und die geläufigen Ansichten tun das ihre, sein Zagen schon vor dem ersten Schritt ins Unerforschte zu bestätigen.

The community of today is the planet, not the bounded nation…patterns of coordinated agression can only break it into factions". We are in a time of "rationalized avarice and sanctified misunderstanding." Joseph Campbell, 1949

The hero, the waker of his own soul, is himself but the convenient means of his own dissolution.

From the perspective of the source, the world is a majestic harmony of forms pouring into being, exploding, and dissolving. But what the swiftly passing creatures experience is a terrible cacophony of battle cries and pain.

Human beings are born too soon; they are unfinished, unready as yet to meet the world. Consequently their whole defense from a universe of dangers is the mother, under whose protection the intra-uterine period is prolonged.

myth is the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into the human cultural manifestation

We must be willing to get rid 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.

I think what we are looking for is a way of experiencing the world that will open to us the transcendent that informs it, and at the same time forms ourselves within it. That is what people want. That is what the soul asks for.

Dream is the personalized myth, myth the depersonalized dream; both myth and dream are symbolic in the same general way of the dynamics 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 shown are directly valid for all mankind.

Nevertheless, every failure to cope with a life situation must be laid, in the end, to a restriction of consciousness. Wars and temper tantrums are the makeshifts of ignorance; regrets are illuminations come too late.

Die Mächte des Abgrunds sind nicht leicht zu bannen.

Chodte za svojim stastim a vesmir vam otvori dvere aj tam, kde dovtedy boli iba mury.

the labyrinth is thoroughly known; we have only to follow the thread of the hero-path. And where we had thought to find an abomination, we shall find a god; where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves; where we had thought to travel outward, we shall come to the center of our own existence; where we had thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world.

Tragedy is the shattering of the forms and our attachment to the forms; comedy, the wild and careless, inexhaustible joy of life invincible.

Oriental idea: you don't teach until you are asked. You don't force your mission down people's throats.) And so the boy

All these different mythologies give us the same essential quest. You leave the world that you're in and go into a depth or into a distance or up to a height. There you come to what was missing in your consciousness in the world you formerly inhabited. Then comes the problem either of staying with that, and letting the world drop off, or returning with that boon and trying to hold on to it as you move back into your social world again. That's not an easy thing to do.

Mythologies are in fact the public dreams that move and shape societies, and conversely one's own dreams are the little myths of the private gods, antigods, and guardian powers that are moving and shaping oneself: revelations of the actual fears, desires, aims, and values by which one's life is subliminally ordered.