Quotes from Joseph Campbell

"Make your god transparent to the transcendent, and it doesn't matter what his name is."

Regrets are illuminations come too late.

Gods suppressed become devils, and often it is these devils whom we first encounter when we turn inward.

If you want the whole thing, the gods will give it to you. But you must be ready for it.

If you are falling....dive.

We're not on our journey to save the world but to save ourselves. But in doing that you save the world. The influence of a vital person vitalizes.

We save the world by being alive ourselves.

If you want to change the world, you have to change the metaphor.

The fates lead him who will; him who won't they drag.

Instead of clearing his own heart the zealot tries to clear the world.

The black moment is the moment when the real message of transformation is going to come. At the darkest moment comes the light.

If you're going to have a story, have a big story, or none at all.

Not all who hesitate are lost. The psyche has many secrets in reserve. And these are not disclosed unless required.

For the bliss of the deep abode is not lightly abandoned in favor of the self-scattering of the wakened state.

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

If there were already a path, it would have to be someone else's; the whole point is to find your own way.

The role of the artist I now understood as that of revealing through the world-surfaces the implicit forms of the soul, and the great agent to assist the artist was the myth.

What the artist must render is a living moment somehow, a living moment actually in action or an inward experience.

The latest incarnation of Oedipus, the continued romance of Beauty and the Beast, stand this afternoon on the corner of Forty-second Street and Fifth Avenue, waiting for the traffic light to change.

Enlarge the pupil of the eye, so that the body with its attendant personality will no longer obstruct the view. Immortality is then experienced as a present fact.

He must put aside his pride, his virtue, beauty and life and bow or submit to the absolutely intolerable.

And if there was no Fall, what then of the need for Redemption? What god was offended and by whom? Some especially touchy cave bear whose skull had been improperly enshrined?

I don't need faith. I have experience.

You must give up the life you planned in order to have the life that is waiting for you.