Quotes from Joseph Campbell

The Fantasy is a reassurance - a promise that the peace of Paradise... is not to be lost...

A hero is someone who has given his or her life to something bigger than oneself.

Dream is the personalized myth, myth is the depoersonalized dream; both myth and dream are symbolic in the same general way of the dynamics of the psyche.

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: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.[6

Moyers: {TS] Eliot speaks about the still point of the turning world, where motion and stasis are together, the hub where the movement of time and the stillness of eternity are together.

With passion you want to possess. The conversion of passion into compassion is the whole problem of marriage.

CAMPBELL: There has to be a training to help you open your ears so that you can begin to hear metaphorically instead of concretely. Freud and Jung both felt that myth is grounded in the unconscious. Anyone writing a creative work knows that you open, you yield yourself, and the book talks to you and builds itself. To a certain extent, you become the carrier of something that is given to you from what have been called the Muses—or, in biblical language, "God." This

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

The position of the palms together- this we use when we pray, do we not? That is a greeting that says that the god that is in you recognises the god in the other. These people are aware of the divine presence in all things.

It would not be too much to say that myth is the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into the human cultural manifestation.

Myths are public dreams; dreams are private myths.

person who has had a mystical experience knows that all the symbolic expressions of it are faulty. The symbols don't render the experience, they suggest it. If you haven't had the experience, how can you know what it is? Try to explain the joy of skiing to somebody living in the tropics who has never even seen snow. There has to be an experience to catch the message, some clue—otherwise you're not hearing what is being said. MOYERS:

In the Hellenistic period, Scylla was identified with the rock of logic, while Charybdis was identified with the abyss of mysticism. One must sail between—as these are all instructions for moving down through the middle, between each pair of opposites.

As Kant said, the thing in itself is no thing. It transcends thingness, it goes past anything that could be thought. The best things can't be told because they transcend thought. The second best are misunderstood, because those are the thoughts that are supposed to refer to that which can't be thought about. The third best are what we talk about. And myth is that field of reference to what is absolutely transcendent.

Now that we moderns have stripped the earth of its mystery—have made, in Saul Bellow's description, "a housecleaning of belief"—how are our imaginations to be nourished? By Hollywood and made-for-TV movies?

What can't be known or named except in our feeble attempt to clothe it in language.

Now you can see today why the world is in trouble. What is the social field today? The social field is the planet, and there isn't a single system of action that has to do with the planet. They all have to do with one interest group or another.

Gods are metaphors transparent to transcendence. And my understanding of the mythological mode is that deities and even people are to be understood in this sense, as metaphors. It's a poetic understanding. It is to be understood in the same sense as Goethe's words at the end of Faust: "Alles Vergängliche ist nur ein Gleichnis" ("Everything transitory is but a reference").

One thing that comes out in myths, for example, is at the bottom of the abyss comes the voice of salvation. The black moment is the moment when the real message of transformation is going to come. At the darkest moment comes the light.

daemonic beauty

One of the great disadvantages of a literary or scriptural tradition like the biblical one is that a deity or context of deities becomes crystallized, petrified at a certain time and place. The deity doesn't continue to grow, expand, or take into account new cultural forces and new realizations in the sciences, and the result is this make-believe conflict we have in our culture between science and religion.

If you do follow your bliss you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. If you are following your bliss you are enjoying that refreshment, that life within you, all the time. Follow your bliss and don't be afraid; the universe will open doors for you where there were only walls.

If you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. Wherever you are—if you are following your bliss, you are enjoying that refreshment, that life within you, all the time.

Behind all these manifestations is the one radiance, which shines through all things. The function of art is to reveal this radiance through the created object.