Quotes from Joseph Campbell

The problem of the theologian is to keep his symbol translucent, so that it may not block out the very light it is supposed to convey.

The very cave you are afraid to enter turns out to be the source of what you are looking for.

Vegetarianism is the first turning away from life, because life lives on lives. Vegetarians are just eating something that can't run away.

The ultimate, unqualified mystery is beyond Human experience

all that we see is but the reflex of a power that endures, untouched by the pain... a transcendent anonymity regarding itself in all of the self-centered, battling egos that are born and die in time.

Life is, in its very essence and character, a terrible mystery—this whole business of living by killing and eating. But it is a childish attitude to say no to life with all its pain, to say that this is something that should not have been.

anyone continually knitting his life into contexts of intention, import, and clarifications of meaning will in the end find that he has lost the sense of experiencing life.

Where there is a way or a path, it's someone else's way.

The dreamer is a distinguished operatic artist, and, like all who have elected to follow, not the safely marked general highways of the day, but the adventure of the special, dimly audible call that comes to those whose ears are open within as well as without

What does the soul truly want is a story

A priest is a functionary of a social sort. The society worships certain deities in a certain way, and the priest becomes ordained as a functionary to carry out that ritual. The deity to whom he is devoted is a deity that was there before he came along. But the shaman's powers are symbolized in his own familiars, deities of his own personal experience. His authority comes out of a psychological experience, not a social ordination.

Every act has both good and evil results. Every act in life yields pairs of opposites in its results. The best we can do is lean toward the light, toward the harmonious relationships that come from compassion with suffering, from understanding the other person.

The water in which the mystic swims is the same water a madman drowns in.

Woman, in the picture language of mythology, represents the totality of what can be known. The hero is the one who comes to know...And if he can match her import, the two, the knower and the known, will be released from every limitation... The hero who can take her as she is, without undue commotion but with the kindness and assurance she requires, is potentially the king, the incarnate god, of her created world.

It is, indeed, very little that we need! But lacking that, the adventure into the labyrinth is without hope.

You should be willing to be eaten also. You are food body.

The happy ending of the fairy tale, the myth, and the divine comedy of the soul is to be read, not as a contradiction, but as a transcendence of the universal tragedy of man. The objective world remains what it was, but, because of a shift of emphasis within the subject, is beheld as though transformed.

When a Sioux Indian would take the calumet, the pipe, he would hold it up stem to the sky so that the sun could take the first puff. And then he'd address the four directions always. In that frame of mind, when you're addressing yourself to the horizon, to the world that you're in, then you're in your place in the world. It's a different way to live.

We must be willing to get rid of the life we planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us. The old skin has to be shed before the new one can come.

If myth is translated into literal fact, then myth is a lie. But if you read it as a reflection of the world inside you, then it's true. Myth is the penultimate truth.

Where we had thought to travel outward, we will come to the center of our own existence. And where we had thought to be alone, we will be with all the world.

The distance of your love is the distance of your life.   Love is exactly as strong as life.

The journey of the hero is about the courage to seek the depths; the image of creative rebirth; the eternal cycle of change within us; the uncanny discovery that the seeker is the mystery which the seeker seeks to know. The hero journey is a symbol that binds, in the original sense of the word, two distant ideas, the spiritual quest of the ancients with the modern search for identity, "always the one, shape-shifting yet marvelously constant story that we find.

Every religion is true one way or another. It is true when understood metaphorically. But when it gets stuck to its own metaphors, interpreting them as facts, then you are in trouble.