Joseph Campbell Quotes

I think what we are looking for is a way of experiencing the world that will open to us the transcendent that informs it, and at the same time forms ourselves within it. That is what people want. That is what the soul asks for.

If you really want to help this world, what you really will have to teach is how to live in it.

The ultimate aim of the quest must be neither release nor ecstasy for oneself, but the wisdom and the power to serve others.

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?

Out of perfection nothing can be made.

When you are on your path, and it is truly your path, doors will open for you where there were no doors for someone else.

The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are.

Our actual ultimate root is in our humanity, not in our personal genealogy.

The ultimate experience of love is a realization that beneath the illusion of two-ness dwells identity.

We have to let go of our plans if we are to become the person we are meant to be.

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

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

"The idea of Truth with capital "T"-that there is something called Truth that's beyond the range of the relativity of the human mind trying to think-is what I call "the error of the found truth." The trouble with all of these damned preachers is the error of the found truth. When they get that tremolo in the voice and tell you what God has said, you know you've got a faker."

... the All is everywhere, and anywhere may become the seat of power. Any blade of grass may assume, in myth, the figure of the savior and conduct the questing wanderer into the sanctum sanctorum of his own heart.

The unpardonable sin, in Campbell’s book, was the sin of inadvertence, of not being alert, not quite awake.