Quotes from Joseph Campbell

suffering," he said, "is mortality itself, which is the prime condition of life.

So what you have here on the dollar bill is the eagle representing this wonderful image of the way in which the transcendent manifests itself in the world. That's what the United States is founded on. If you're going to govern properly, you've got to govern from the apex of the triangle, in the sense of the world eye at the top.

we are at this moment participating in one of the very greatest leaps of the human spirit to a knowledge not only of our outside nature but also of our own deep inward mystery.

Our true reality is in our identity and unity with all life.

mythological, not sociological, terms. If this position were just a role, the judge could wear a gray suit to court instead of the magisterial black robe. For the law to hold authority beyond mere coercion, the power of the judge must be ritualized, mythologized. So must much of life today, Campbell said, from religion and war to love and death.

But no one with a will to the service of others would permit himself such an escape. The ultimate aim of the quest must be neither release nor ecstasy for oneself, but the wisdom and the power to serve others." One of the many distinctions between the celebrity and the hero, he said, is that one lives only for self while the other acts to redeem society.

A journalist, it is said, enjoys a license to be educated in public; we are the lucky ones, allowed to spend our days in a continuing course of adult education.

And all of our concerns have to do with economics and politics and not with the voice and sound of reason.

quoted an old Roman: "The fates lead him who will; him who won't they drag.

what destroys reason is passion.

Preachers err, he told me, by trying "to talk people into belief; better they reveal the radiance of their own discovery.

The principal passion in politics is greed. That is what pulls you down.

When the mask of Darth Vader is removed, you see an unformed man, one who has not developed as a human individual. What you see is a strange and pitiful sort of undifferentiated face.

A handsome girl with a round, dark face set like a flower on a stalk-like neck smiled prettily at John as she shut the door, then glanced at his companion and became lost in the contemplation of his eyes.

the "guiding idea" of his work was to find "the commonality of themes in world myths, pointing to a constant requirement in the human psyche for a centering in terms of deep principles.

each religion is a kind of software that has its own set of signals and will work. If a person is really involved in a religion and really building his life on it, he better stay with the software that he has got.

mythology is an interior road map of experience, drawn by people who have traveled it.

Arnold suffered her stare for a moment, then turned, without rudeness, and cast his eyes about the shelves.

this grand and cacophonous chorus began when our primal ancestors told stories to themselves about the animals that they killed for food and about the supernatural world to which the animals seemed to go when they died.

El yogui hindú, luchando por la liberación, se identifica con la Luz y nunca regresa. Pero nadie con la voluntad de servir a otros se permitiría semejante evasión. El objetivo último de la hazaña no debe ser ni la liberación ni la felicidad personales, sino la sabiduría y el poder para servir a los demás».

if he failed to send the beasts back to be sacrificed again, the hunters and their kin would starve. Thus early societies learned that "the essence of life is that it lives by killing and eating; that's the great mystery that the myths have to deal with.

The main motifs of the myths are the same, and they have always been the same. If you want to find your own mythology, the key is with what society do you associate? Every mythology has grown up in a certain society in a bounded field. Then they come into collision and relationship, and they amalgamate, and you get a more complex mythology.

Reason has to do with finding the ground of being and the fundamental structuring of order of the universe.

She was clearly competent to face, satisfy, and treat with asexual ease the brotherhood of men.