Quotes from Joseph Campbell

shuffled off this mortal coil.

I even have a superstition that has grown on me as the result of invisible hands coming all the time - namely, that 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. When you can see that, you begin to meet people who are in the field of your bliss, and they open the doors to you.

When you are no longer compelled by desire or fear…When you have seen the radiance of eternity in all the forms of time…When you follow your bliss…doors will open where you would not have thought there were doors…and the world will step in and help

Schopenhauer sagely remarks in his paper on The Will in Nature, "we are sunk in the sea of riddles and inscrutables, knowing and understanding neither what is around us nor ourselves.

a complicated story. Indeed all of these get to be pretty complicated. But Isis and her husband Osiris

Some people are late bloomers and come to particular stages at a relative late stage. You have to have a feeling for where you are. You only have one life to live and you don't have to live it for six people. Pay attention to it.

It is not society that is to guide and save the creative hero, but precisely the reverse. 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.

Myths inspire the realization of the possibility of your perfection, the fullness of your strength, and the bringing of solar light into the world. Slaying monsters is slaying the dark things. Myths grab you somewhere down inside.

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. The experience of eternity is right here and now is the function of life.

What is a god? A god is a personification of a motivating power or a value system that functions in human life and in the universe—the powers of your own body and of nature.

It took me a long time to get around to marriage, principally because I felt that women always wanted to have fun, and that was not my interest at all. It would interfere with my reading. That's really the truth.

The boy answers, Don't ask unless you are willing to be hurt. Indra says, I ask. Teach. (That, by the way, is a good Oriental idea: you don't teach until you are asked. You don't force your mission down people's throats.)

Yahweh—a jealous god, who would hold men to himself and who turned mankind away from the Tree of Immortality, instead of leading us to it. Such a god in the Orient would be regarded as a deluding idol.

a curious characteristic of our unformed species that we live and model our lives through acts of make-believe.

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. The experience of eternity right here and now is the function of life

Beirut. What does that say to you? CAMPBELL: It says to me that they don't know how to apply their religious ideas to contemporary life, and to human beings rather than just to their own community. It's a terrible example of the failure of religion to meet the modern world.

MOYERS: A new king or new queen of England is given the coronation ring. CAMPBELL: Yes, because there's another aspect of the ring—it is a bondage. As king, you are bound to a principle. You are living not simply your own way. You have been marked. In initiation rites, when people are sacrificed and tattooed, they are bonded to another and to the society.

of that dragon power. When Siegfried has killed the dragon and tasted the blood, he hears the song of nature. He has transcended his humanity and reassociated himself with the powers of nature, which are the powers of our life, and from which our minds remove us. You see, consciousness thinks it's running the

The serpent, who dies and is resurrected, shedding its skin and renewing its life, is the lord of the central tree, where time and eternity come together.

The word compassion means literally suffering with. Of course compassion condones suffering in that it recognizes yes, suffering is life.

Because I have called and you refused, 24 I have stretched out my hand and no one regarded, Because you disdained all my counsel, 25 And would have none of my rebuke, I also will laugh at your calamity; 26 I will mock when your terror comes, When your terror comes like a storm, 27 And your destruction comes like a whirlwind, When distress and anguish come upon you. Proverbs 1:23-27

All men are capable of reason. That is the fundamental principle of democracy.

No return to the office! No return, anymore, to anything! Her life had cracked and smashed, at last; let it go, let it go.

the most evident distinguishing sign is man's organization of his life according primarily to mythic, and only secondarily economic, aims and laws. Food and drink, reproduction and nest-building, it is true, play formidable roles in the lives no less of men than of chimpanzees. But what of the economics of the Pyramids, the cathedrals of the Middle Ages, Hindus starving to death with edible cattle strolling all around them, or the history of Israel, from the time of Saul to right now?