Quotes from Joseph Campbell

Full circle, from the tomb of the womb to the womb of the tomb, we come:

Der Engländer, der sich im Urwald von Nigeria zum Dinner umkleidet, fühlt, daß diese Handlung einen Sinn hat.

is there not some point of wisdom beyond the conflicts of illusion and truth by which lives can be put back together again? That is a prime question, I would say, of this hour in the bringing up of children.

And so every one of us shares the supreme ordeal--carries the cross of the redeemer--not in the bright moments of his tribe's great victories, but in the silences of his personal despair.

Woman, in the picture language of mythology, represents the totality of what can be known… (She) is the guide to the sublime acme of sensuous adventure. By deficient eyes she is reduced to inferior states; by the evil eye of ignorance she is spellbound to banality and ugliness. But she is redeemed by the eyes of understanding.

What do you need the mythology? … Rituals evoke it. Consider the position of judges in our society, which Campbell saw in mythological, not sociological, terms. If this position were just a role, the judge could wear a gray suit to court instead of the magisterial black robe. For the law to hold authority beyond mere coercion, the power of the judge must be ritualized, mythologized. So must much of life today, Campbell said, from religion and war to love and death.

The idea of Truth with capital T-that there is something called Truth that's beyond the range of the relativity of the human mind trying to think-is what I call the error of the found truth. The trouble with all of these damned preachers is the error of the found truth. When they get that tremolo in the voice and tell you what God has said, you know you've got a faker.

Now, one of the main problems of mythology is reconciling the mind to this brutal precondition of all life, which lives by the killing and eating of lives. You don't kid yourself by eating only vegetables, either, for they, too, are alive. So the essence of life is this eating of itself! Life lives on lives, and the reconciliation of the human mind and sensibilities to that fundamental fact

Where you stumble, there lies your treasure. The very cave you are afraid to enter turns out to be the source of what you are looking for. The damned thing in the cave that was so dreaded has become the center.

Only when that mortal "you" will have erased everything about itself that it cherishes and is holding to, will "you" have come to the brink of an experience of identity with that Being which is no being yet is the Being beyond the nonbeing of all things. Nor is It anything that you have ever known, ever named, or even thought about in this world:

Our own poor poets, I am afraid, have been so intimidated by our clinics and laboratories that they have abandoned the first principles of beginning, that of the festival; and the heart of the festival has always been the atmosphere of myth, of delight.

an ameliorative mythology [that through] prayer or good deeds or some other activity, one can change the basic principles, the fundamental preconditions of life... This is like marrying someone in order to improve him or her—it is not a marriage.

I was intrigued by the definition of the Force. Ben Kenobi says, "The Force is an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us, it penetrates us, it binds the galaxy together." And I've read in The Hero with a Thousand Faces similar descriptions of the world navel, of the sacred place, of the power that is at the moment of creation.

Mythology is the song. It is the song of the imagination, inspired by the energies of the body.

Every step they took, she told him something he'd never known before; and yet it always seemed, the moment she'd said it, as if he had known it all his life.

The girl was absorbed in him, without consciousness or shame.

I am Shiva – this is the great meditation of the yogis in the Himalayas . . . Heaven and hell are within us, and all the gods are within us . . . all the gods, all the heavens, all the worlds, are within us.

CAMPBELL: Poets are simply those who have made a profession and a lifestyle of being in touch with their bliss. Most

And more important, all the life-potentialities that we never managed to bring to adult realization, those other portions of ourself, are there; for such golden seeds do not die. If only a portion of that lost totality could be dredged up into the light of day, we should experience a marvelous expansion of our powers, a vivid renewal of life.

The unpardonable sin, in Campbell's book, was the sin of inadvertence, of not being alert, not quite awake.

Significant images render insights beyond speech, beyond the kinds of meaning speech defines. And if they do not speak to you, that is because you are not ready for them, and words will only serve to make you think you have understood, thus cutting you off altogether.

It is remarkable how completely forgotten episodes, when touched with a word, open to the memory—at first vaguely, like the recollection of a dream, but then with increasing clarity and certitude, until at last all is again present, and one wonders how such scenes could have ever been forgotten.

and though it is perhaps too facile to say that he was already in love with her, it is certainly true that from that moment on she was a permanent element in his mind.

The hero is the champion of things becoming, not of things become, because he is.