Joseph Campbell Quotes

Myth basically serves four functions. The first is the mystical function,... realizing what a wonder the universe is, and what a wonder you are, and experiencing awe before this mystery....The second is a cosmological dimension, the dimension with which science is concerned – showing you what shape the universe is, but showing it in such a way that the mystery again comes through.... The third function is the sociological one – supporting and validating a certain social order.... It is the sociological function of myth that has taken over in our world – and it is out of date.... But there is a fourth function of myth, and this is the one that I think everyone must try today to relate to – and that is the pedagogical function, of how to live a human lifetime under any circumstances.

I begin to think that I have a genius for working like an ox over totally irrelevant subjects. … I am filled with an excruciating sense of never having gotten anywhere — but when I sit down and try to discover where it is I want to get, I’m at a loss. … The thought of growing into a professor gives me the creeps. A lifetime to be spent trying to kid myself and my pupils into believing that the thing that we are looking for is in books! I don’t know where it is — but I feel just now pretty sure that it isn’t in books.

Atonement (at-one-ment) consists in no more than the abandonment of the self-generated double monster-the dragon thought to be God (superego) and the dragon thought to be Sin (repressed id). But this requires an abandonment of the attachment to ego itself, and that is what is difficult.

Let me recall at this point Nietzsche’s statements regarding classic and romantic art. He identified two types or orders of each. There is the romanticism of true power that shatters contemporary forms to go beyond these to new forms; and there is, on the other hand, the romanticism that is unable to achieve form at all, and so smashes and disparages out of resentment. And with respect to classicism likewise, there is the classicism that finds an achievement of the recognized forms easy and can play with them at will, expressing through them its own creative aims in a rich and vital way; and there is the classicism that clings to form desperately out of weakness, dry and hard, authoritarian and cold. The point I would make - and which I believe was also Nietzsche’s - is that form is the medium, the vehicle, through which life becomes manifest in its grand style, articulate and grandiose, and that the mere shattering of form is for human as well as for animal life a disaster, ritual and decorum being the structuring forms of all civilization.

Recordé también esa descripción cuando una amiga le preguntó a uno de mis colegas por nuestra colaboración con Campbell: «¿Para qué necesitan la mitología?». Esta mujer sostenía la opinión, muy corriente y moderna, de que «todos esos dioses griegos y sus historias» nada tienen que ver con la actual condición humana. Lo que ella no sabía (e ignora la mayoría) es que las reliquias de esas «viejas historias» adornan las paredes de nuestro sistema interior de creencias, como restos de antiguos utensilios en un yacimiento arqueológico. Pero como somos seres orgánicos, hay energía en todos esos restos. Los rituales la evocan. Pensemos en la posición de los jueces en nuestra sociedad, que Campbell analizó en términos mitológicos, no sociológicos. Si esta posición fuera solamente un papel a desempeñar, el juez podría asistir con un traje gris al tribunal en lugar de vestir la toga negra. Para que la ley tenga autoridad más allá de la mera coacción, el poder del juez debe ser ritualizado, mitologizado.

Reading what you want, and having one book lead to the next, is the way I found my discipline.

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

old Roman: “The fates lead him who will; him who won’t they drag.

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?

And so every one of us shares the supreme ordeal — carries the cross of the redeemer — not in the bright moments of his tribe's great victories, but in the silences of his personal despair.

The secret cause of all suffering,” he said, “is mortality itself, which is the prime condition of life. It cannot be denied if life is to be affirmed.

The inflated ego of the tyrant is a curse to himself and his world – no matter how his affairs may prosper. Self-terrorized, fear-haunted, alert at every hand to meet and battle back the anticipated aggressions of his environment, which are primarily the reflections of the uncontrollable impulses to acquisition within himself. The giant of self-achieved independence is the world’s messenger of disaster, even though, in his mind, he may entertain himself with humane intentions.

Ducunt volentem fata, nolentem trahunt: “The Fates lead him who will; him who won’t, they drag.

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

Eternity isn't some later time. Eternity isn't even a long time. Eternity has nothing to do with time. Eternity is that dimension of here and now that all thinking in temporal terms cuts off.... the experience of eternity right here and now, in all things, whether thought of as good or as evil, is the function of life.