Quotes from Joseph Campbell

in this wonderful human brain of ours there has dawned a realization unknown to the other primates. It is that of the individual, conscious of himself as such, and aware that he, and all that he cares for, will one day die. Fig. 2.2 — Neanderthal Burial This recognition of mortality and the requirement to transcend it is the first great impulse to mythology.

Rollo May says there is so much violence in American society today because there are no more great myths to help young men and women relate to the world or to understand that world beyond what is seen.

Destruction before Creation.

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.)

manifestation of the horrendous power that is of all creation. The ends of things are always painful. But pain is part of there being a world at all.

Any life career that you choose in following your bliss should be chosen with that sense—that nobody can frighten me off from this thing. And no matter what happens, this is the validation of my life and action.

What we're learning in our schools is not the wisdom of life. We're learning technologies, we're getting information.

It is the still point in the turning world.

The one who watches athletic games instead of participating in athletics is involved in a surrogate achievement. But when you think about what people are actually undergoing in our civilization, you realize it's a very grim thing to be a modern human being. The drudgery of the lives of most of the people who have to support families—well, it's a life-extinguishing affair.

The achievement of the hero is one that he is ready for, and it's really a manifestation of his character. And it's amusing, the way in which the landscape and the conditions of the environment match the readiness of the hero. The adventure that he's ready for is the one that he gets.

All men are competent to know the mind of God. There is no revelation special to any people.

The god you worship is the god you deserve.

How interesting! In the older view the goddess Universe was alive, herself organically the Earth, the horizon, and the heavens.

Oh, because a dream is a personal experience of that deep, dark ground that is the support of our conscious lives, and a myth is the society's dream. The myth is the public dream and the dream is the private myth. If your private myth, your dream, happens to coincide with that of the society, you are in good accord with your group. If it isn't, you've got an adventure in the dark forest ahead of you.

How do you reconcile the role of science, which is reason, with the role of faith, which is religion?

Jung speaks of two orders of dream, the personal dream and the archetypal dream, or the dream of mythic dimension.

there is everywhere in the civilized world a rapidly rising incidence of vice and crime

That is a greeting which says that the god that is in you recognizes the god in the other. These people are aware of the divine presence in all things.

But there is a fourth function of myth, and this is the one that I think everyone must try today to relate to—and that is the pedagogical function, of how to live a human lifetime under any circumstances. Myths can teach you that.

That would be the desirable situation most of the time. The five main virtues of the medieval knight might be brought in here. One is temperance, another is courage, another is love, another is loyalty, and another is courtesy. Courtesy is respect for the decorum of the society in which you are living.

think of compassion as the fundamental religious experience and, unless that is there, you have nothing.

The ultimate divine mystery is there found immanent within each. It is not "out there" somewhere. It is within you. And no one has ever been cut off. The only difficulty is, however, that some folk simply don't know how to look within. The fault is no one's, if not one's own. Nor is the problem one of an original Fall of the "first man," many thousand years ago, and of exile and atonement. The problem is psychological. And it can be solved.

What Joyce called "the grave and constant" in human sufferings Campbell knew to be a principal theme of classic mythology.

The sense of this, it seemed to me, might be that from above or below, or from any point of the compass, the creative Word might be heard, which is the great thesis of democracy.