Quotes from Joseph Campbell

Suddenly you're ripped into being alive. And life is pain, and life is suffering, and life is horror, but my god you're alive and its spectacular.

The image of God is your final obstruction to a religious experience.

In one of the Upanishads it says, when the glow of a sunset holds you and you say 'Aha,' that is the recognition of the divinity. And when you say 'Aha' to an art object, that is a recognition of divinity. And what divinity is it? It is your divinity, which is the only divinity there is. We are all phenomenal manifestations of a divine will to live, and that will and the consciousness of life is one in all of us, and that is what artwork expresses.

The best way to help mankind is through the perfection of yourself.

What am I? Am I the bulb that carries the light, or am I the light of which the bulb is a vehicle?

A constant image [in myths] is that of the conflict of the eagle and the serpent. The serpent bound to the earth, the eagle in spiritual flight – isn't that conflict something we all experience? And then, when the two amalgamate, we get a wonderful dragon, a serpent with wings.

I don't believe in being interested in a subject just because it's said to be important. I believe in being caught by it somehow or other.

I say, follow your bliss and don't be afraid, and doors will open where you didn't know they were going to be.

It's not an advantage to be without a PhD. But it's an advantage not to have taken a PhD because of the things that they do to you to get you into the slot that they want you in.

In our society of fixed texts and printed words, it is the function of the poet to see the life value of the facts round about, and to deify them, as it were, to provide images that relate the everyday to the eternal.

Maslow's five values are the values for which people live when they have nothing to live for. Nothing has seized them, nothing has caught them, nothing has driven them spiritually mad and made them worth talking to.

Every myth is psychologically symbolic. Its narratives and images are to be read, therefore, not literally, but as metaphors.

When a spider makes a beautiful web, the beauty comes out of the spider's nature. It's instinctive beauty. How much of the beauty of our own lives is about the beauty of being alive?

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...

The world is perfect. It's a mess. It has always been a mess. We are not going to change it.

I would say that all our sciences are the material that has to be mythologized. A mythology gives spiritual import - what one might call rather the psychological, inward import, of the world of nature round about us, as understood today. There's no real conflict between science and religion ... What is in conflict is the science of 2000 BC ... and the science of the 20th century AD.

Privation and suffering alone open the mind to all that is hidden to others. (Igjugarjuk)

In the older view the goddess Universe was alive, herself organically the Earth, the horizon, and the heavens. Now she is dead, and the universe is not an organism, but a building, with gods at rest in it in luxury: not as personifications of the energies in their manners of operation, but as luxury tenants, requiring service. And Man, accordingly, is not as a child born to flower in the knowledge of his own eternal portion but as a robot fashioned to serve.

You can get a lot of work done if you stay with it and are excited and its play instead of work.

The fundamental human experience is that of compassion.

Love thine enemies because they are the instruments of your destiny.

A myth is something that has never happened, but is happening all the time.

Every moment is utterly unique and will not be continued in eternity. This fact gives life its poignancy and should concentrate your attention on what you are experiencing now.

It has always been the prime function of mythology and rite to supply the symbols that carry the human spirit forward, in counteraction to those that tend to tie it back.