Quotes from Joseph Campbell

Myth is not the same as history; myths are not inspiring stories of people who lived notable lives. No, myth is the transcendent in relationship to the present.

My definition of mythology is "other people's religion," which suggests that ours must be something else. My definition of religion, then, is "misunderstood mythology"—and the misunderstanding consists in mistaking the symbol for the reference.

But marriage is recognition of a spiritual identity. If we live a proper life, if our minds are on the right qualities in regarding the person of the opposite sex, we will find our proper male or female counterpart.

Campbell surmised "a magical, wonderful accord" growing between the hunter and the hunted, as if they were locked in a "mystical, timeless" cycle of death, burial, and resurrection. Their art—the paintings on cave walls—and oral literature gave form to the impulse we now call religion.

Now brotherhood in most of the myths I know of is confined to a bounded community. In bounded communities, aggression is projected outward.

Well, the old English tale of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a famous one.

Campbell was fascinated by how this symbol was seized upon by the world's great religions as the revelation of eternal truth—that from death comes life, or as he put it: "From sacrifice, bliss.

The images of God are many, he said, calling them "the masks of eternity" that both cover and reveal "the Face of Glory." He wanted to know what it means that God assumes such different masks in different cultures, yet how it is that comparable stories can be found in these divergent traditions

MOYERS: So the one great story is our search to find our place in the drama? CAMPBELL: To be in accord with the grand symphony that this world is, to put the harmony of our own body in accord with that harmony.

I'd be damn p-p-p-proud, he said, of a f-father like Martin Hopper. The girl tossed her head with disdain. That's just your trouble, Douglas Hyde. What do you mean? he bristled angrily. You know he's a phony, she answered coldly. You've told me so yourself. And yet, in a pinch, you defend him. The two stared at each other—blonde against dark—in absolute opposition.

You have to have a feeling for where you are. You've got only one life to live, and you don't have to live it for six people. Pay attention to it.

MOYERS: A poem? CAMPBELL: I mean a vocabulary in the form not of words but of acts and adventures, which connotes something transcendent of the action here, so that you always feel in accord with the universal being.

Her every step seemed an advertisement of her entire anatomy.

MOYERS: But that's not the Christian idea of creation

Spiritually, however, the center is where sight is. Stand on a height and view the horizon. Stand on the moon and view the whole earth rising—even, by way of television, in your parlor." The result is an unprecedented expansion of horizon

You can't have creativity unless you leave behind the bounded, the fixed, all the rules.

it is not science that has diminished human beings or divorced us from divinity. On the contrary, the new discoveries of science "rejoin us to the ancients" by enabling us to recognize in this whole universe "a reflection magnified of our own most inward nature;

Trebuie s? fim dispu?i s? renun??m la via?a pe care ne-am planificat-o, pentru a o putea tr?i pe cea care ne a?teapt?.

traditions. In the other mythologies, one puts oneself in accord with the world, with the mixture of good and evil. But in the religious system of the Near East, you identify with the good and fight against the evil. The biblical traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all speak with derogation of the so-called nature religions.

counterpart, in

matinees had borrowed freely from those ancient tales. And that the stories we learned in Sunday school corresponded with those of other cultures that recognized the soul's high adventure, the quest of mortals to grasp the reality of God. He helped me to see the connections, to understand how the pieces fit, and not merely to fear less but to welcome what he described as "a mighty multicultural future.

The adventure is its own reward—but it's necessarily dangerous, having both negative and positive possibilities, all of them beyond control.

When he said that myths are clues to our deepest spiritual potential, able to lead us to delight, illumination, and even rapture, he spoke as one who had been to the places he was inviting others to visit.

The public hero is sensitive to the needs of his time.