Quotes About Joseph Campbell

How does the ordinary person come to the transcendent? For a start, I would say, study poetry. Learn how to read a poem. You need not have the experience to get the message, or at least some indication of the message. It may come gradually. (92)

With the moon walk, the religious myth that sustained these notions could no longer be held. With our view of earthrise, we could see that the earth and the heavens were no longer divided but that the earth is in the heavens. (105)

Myths are public dreams, dreams are private myths. We must be willing to get rid of the life we planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us. I have bought this wonderful machine — a computer ... it seems to me to be an Old Testament god, with a lot of rules and no mercy.

Mythology may, in a real sense, be defined as other people's religion. And religion may, in a sense, be understood as popular misunderstanding of mythology. (8)

Mythology, in other words, is psychology misread as biography, history, and cosmology.

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

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

I will participate in the game. It is a wonderful, wonderful opera – except that it hurts.

facts of the mind made manifest in a fiction of matter,' as my friend the late Maya Deren once phrased the mystery.

Humor is the touchstone of the truly mythological as distinct from the more literal-minded and sentimental theological mood.

It has been well said that mythology is the penultimate truth—penultimate because the ultimate cannot be put into words. It is beyond words, beyond images

The myth is not my own; I have it from my mother. Euripides

You changed the definition of a myth from the search for meaning to the experience of meaning. CAMPBELL: Experience of life.

They come from every culture but with timeless themes. CAMPBELL: The themes are timeless, and the inflection is to the culture.

Just as anyone who listens to the muse will hear, you can write out of your own intention or out of inspiration. There is such a thing. It comes up and talks. And those who have heard deeply the rhythms and hymns of the gods, the words of the gods, can recite those hymns in such a way that the gods will be attracted. JOSEPH CAMPBELL, Esalen, 1983

Mythology opens the world so that it becomes transparent to something that is beyond speech, beyond words—in short, what we call transcendence. Without that you don't have a mythology. Any system of thinking, ideologies of one kind or another, that does not open to transcendence cannot be classified or understood mythologically.

And so the impulses of nature are what give authenticity to life, not obeying rules come from a supernatural authority, that's the sense of the Grail.

The individual has to find an aspect of myth that relates to his own life. Myth basically serves four functions. The first is the mystical function—that is the one I've been speaking about, realizing what a wonder the universe is

The second is a cosmological dimension, the dimension with which science is concerned—showing you what the shape of the universe is, but showing it in such a way that the mystery again comes through.

The mechanically induced mystical experience is what you have there.

Rollo May says there is so much violence in American society today because there are no more great myths to help young men and women relate to the world or to understand that world beyond what is seen.

What Joyce called "the grave and constant" in human sufferings Campbell knew to be a principal theme of classic mythology.

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

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