Quotes from Joseph Campbell

Atonement (at-one-ment) consists in no more than the abandonment of that self-generated double monster — the dragon thought to be God (superego)* and the dragon thought to be Sin (repressed id). But this requires an abandonment of the attachment to ego itself; and that is what is difficult.

Myth is much more important and true than history.

This death to the logic of emotional commitments of our chance moment in the world of space and time, this recognition of, the shift of our emphasis to, the universal life that throbs and celebrates its victory in the very kiss of our own annihilation, this amor fati, 'love of fate,' love of the fate that is inevitably death, constitutes the experience of the tragic art...

In bounded communities, aggression is projected outward. For example, the ten commandments say, "Thou shalt not kill." Then the next chapter says, "Go into Canaan and kill everybody in it." That is a bounded field. The myths of participation and love pertain only to the in-group, and the out-group is totally other.

É descendo até o abismo que recuperamos os tesouros da vida. Onde voce tropeça, ali está seu tesouro.

The dead are buried to be born again, and the cycles of the plant world become models for the myths and rituals of mankind.

The ultimate dragon is within you. It is your ego clamping you down.

Man should not submit to the powers from outside but command them. How to do it is the problem.

Wherever you are—if you are following your bliss, you are enjoying that refreshment, that life within you, all the time.

transcendent means to "transcend," to go past duality. Everything in the field of time and space is dual.

Just as anyone who listens to the muse will hear, you can write out of your own intention or out of inspiration. There is such a thing. It comes up and talks. And those who have heard deeply the rhythms and hymns of the gods, the words of the gods, can recite those hymns in such a way that the gods will be attracted. JOSEPH CAMPBELL, Esalen, 1983

It is the imperfections of life that are lovable.

Mythology opens the world so that it becomes transparent to something that is beyond speech, beyond words—in short, what we call transcendence. Without that you don't have a mythology. Any system of thinking, ideologies of one kind or another, that does not open to transcendence cannot be classified or understood mythologically.

whereas some moralists may find it possible to make a distinction between two spheres and reigns—one of flesh, the other of the spirit, one of time, the other of eternity—where ever love arises such definitions vanish, and a sense of life awakens in which all such oppositions are at one.

Perfection would be a bore, wouldn't it? CAMPBELL: It would have to be. It would be inhuman

Schopenhauer's answer is that such a psychological crisis represents the breakthrough of a metaphysical realization, which is that you and that other are one, that you are two aspects of the one life, and that your apparent separateness is but an effect of the way we experience forms under the conditions of space and time. Our true reality is in our identity and unity with all life.

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

And so what then happens to the children of a society that has refused to allow any such interplay to develop, but, clinging to its inherited dream as to a fixture of absolute truth, rejects the novelties of consciousness, of reason, science, and new facts?

The society is the enemy when it imposes its structures on the individual. On the dragon there are many scales. Every one of them says Thou Shalt. Kill the dragon Thou Shalt. When one has killed that dragon, one has become The Child.

Follow your bliss.

A félelem az elsÅ' tapasztalat, és ez a tapasztalat azt mondja: én.

There was a wonderful old man [...] who had a piece of property [...] he would rent out for twenty dollards a year or so to any young person he thought might have a future in the arts. [...] He declared he wouldn't install running water because he didn't like the class of people it attracted.

You're no longer this one alone; your identity is in a relationship. Marriage is not a simple love affair, it's an ordeal, and the ordeal is the sacrifice of ego to a relationship in which two have become one.

first book of Corinthians: "When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.