Quotes from Joseph Campbell

The body is not the Bodhi tree. The mind, no mirror bright. Since nothing is there, on what should dust alight?

Pluralism makes a unifying myth impossible. But if we cannot reinstate such a mythology we can, at least, return to the source from which mythology springs - the creative imagination.

These caves are the original men's rite sanctuaries where the boys became no longer their mothers' sons but their fathers' sons.

Desire and fear: these are the two emotions by which all life in the world is governed.

The conquest of the fear of death is the recovery of life's joy. One can experience an unconditional affirmation of life only when one has accepted death, not as contrary to life but as an aspect of life.

We must constantly die one way or another to the selfhood already achieved.

MOYERS: And what does the idea of reincarnation suggest? CAMPBELL: It suggests that you are more than you think you are. There are dimensions of your being and a potential for realization and consciousness that are not included in your concept of yourself. Your life is much deeper and broader than you conceive it to be here.

My friend had thought, "God did this to me." I told her, "No, you did it to yourself. The God is within you. You yourself are your creator. If you find that place in yourself from which you brought this thing about, you will be able to live with it and affirm it, perhaps even enjoy it, as your life.

What is the kingdom [of God]? it lies in our realization of the ubiquity of the divine presence in our neighbors, in our enemies, in all of us.

And so the impulses of nature are what give authenticity to life, not obeying rules come from a supernatural authority, that's the sense of the Grail.

Where your pain is, there is your life, you might say.

In Buddhist systems, more especially those of Tibet, the meditation Buddhas appear in two aspects, one peaceful and the other wrathful. If you are clinging fiercely to your ego and its little temporal world of sorrows and joys, hanging on for dear life, it will be the wrathful aspect of the deity that appears. It will seem terrifying. But the moment your ego yields and gives up, that same meditation Buddha is experienced as a bestower of bliss.

The passage to fulfillment lies between the perils of desire and fear.

The best advice is to take it all as if it had been your intention - with that, you evoke the participation of your will.

And so, it seems to me, there is a critical problem indicated here, which parents and families have to face squarely: that, namely, of insuring that the signals which they are imprinting on their young are such as will attune them to, and not alienate them from, the world in which they are going to have to live; unless, of course, one is dead set on bequeathing to one's heirs one's own paranoia. More

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.

Minha definição de demônio é um anjo que não foi reconhecido. Melhor dizendo, é um poder seu para o qual você negou expressão, e você reprime. Então, como toda energia reprimida, ela começa a crescer e a tornar-se muito perigosa.

Myths are the mental supports of rites; rites, the physical enactments of myths.

the only true wisdom lives far from mankind, out in the great loneliness, and can be reached only through suffering. Privation and suffering alone open the mind to all that is hidden to others.' 

The hero, whether god or goddess, man or woman, the figure in a myth or the dreamer of a dream, discovers and assimilates his opposite (his own unsuspecting self) either by swallowing it or by being swallowed. one by one the resistences are broken. he must put aside his pride, his virtue, beauty, and life, and bow or submit to the absolutely intolerable. Then he finds that he and his opposite are not of differing species, but one flesh.

We can't have a mythology for a long, long time to come. Things are changing too fast to become mythologized.

The end of the world is not an event to come, it is an event of psychological transformation, of visionary transformation. You see not the world of solid things but a world of radiance.

Man should not be in the service of society, society should be in the service of man. When man is in the service of society, you have a monster state, and that's what is threatening the world at this minute.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre/The falcon cannot hear the falconer;/Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;/Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,/The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere/The ceremony of innocence is drowned.