Joseph Campbell Quotes

A good way to learn is to find a book that seems to be dealing with the problems that you're now dealing with. That will certainly give you some clues. in my own life I took my instruction from reading Thomas Mann and James Joyce, both of whom had applied basic mythological themes to the interpretation of the problems, questions, realizations, and concerns of young men growing up in the modern world. You can discover your own guiding-myth motifs through the works of a good novelist who himself understands these things. p177

How teach again, however, what has been taught correctly and incorrectly learned a thousand thousand times, throughout the millenniums of mankind's prudent folly? That is the hero's ultimate difficult task.

"The look that one directs at things, both outward and inward, as an artist, is not the same as that with which one would regard the same as a man, but at once colder and more passionate. As a man, you might be well-disposed, patient, loving, positive, and have a wholly uncritical inclination to look upon everything as all right, but as an artist your daemon constrains you to "observe", to take note, lightning fast and with hurtful malice, of every detail that in the literary sense would be characteristic, distinctive, significant, opening insights, typifying the race, the social or the psychological mode, recording all as mercilessly as though you had no human relationship to the observed object whatever."

Mythology is composed by poets out of their insights and realizations. Mythologies are not invented; they are found. You can no more tell us what your dream is going to be tonight than we can invent a myth. Myths come from the mystical region of essential experience.

I am Shiva – this is the great meditation of the yogis in the Himalayas . . . Heaven and hell are within us, and all the gods are within us . . . all the gods, all the heavens, all the worlds, are within us.

Not all who hesitate are lost.

ليس من الضروري فهم النهاية السعيدة للحكاية والأسطورة والكوميديا الإلهية للروح على أنها نقيض لتراجيديا الإنسان الكونية، بل يجب تفسيرها كتجاوزٍ لها. العالم الموضوعي يبقى كما كان، وإن كان قد أصبج يُدرك، كما لو أنه تحول من خلال زحزحة المعنى في الذات. وحيثما يتصارع كل من الموت والحياة، أحدهما ضد الآخر، يتبدى الوجود المستمر لمن لا يُبالي بأحداث الزمن كما يتبدى مصير فقاعة من الماء الغالي أو كما يتبدى للكون ظهور واختفاء درب التبانة.
التراجيديا هي تخلخل الأشكال، تخلخل ارتباطاتنا بهذه الأشكال، بينما تمثل الكوميديا السعادة الدائمة المنفلتة واللامبالية للحياة، التي لا يمكن التغلب عليها. وبهذا يكون لدينا صياغتان اثنتان مختلفتان للموضوع الميثولوجي ذاته وللتجربة ذاتها. حيث تكون التجربتان منغلقتين، على أن كل واحدة منهما تتداخل في الثانية وتجد نفسها متضمنة فيها : الانحدار والصعود اللذين يكوِّنان معاً كلية التجلي، التي هي الحياة، والتي يجب أن يتعرفها الفرد ويحبها.

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?

Artemis, along with Selene and Hekate, was one of the Greek triads representing the Old European three-bodied or triune aspect of the Goddess. We can see this represented in this figurine (Fig. 72) of Artemis as part of three-fold Hekate. First you have the pillar — the goddess mother is the axis of the universe herself. Round about are three representations of the Goddess, including Artemis, and Hekate, who represents the chthonic underworld — the magic aspect of the Goddess — and then dancing in a relaxed, fluent manner around about we see the three Graces. Artemis is the giver of abundance: Our Lady of the Wild Things, and the All-Mother of the many breasts, who bears the totality of the entities of the natural world. This is something very, very different from the image of the virgin goddess and the mere huntress that we have normally associated with her.

Lo que el creativo saca a la luz es algo que estaba esperando ser extraído en todos.

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.

If we could dredge up something forgotten not only by ourselves but by our whole generation or our entire civilization, we should become indeed the boonbringer, the culture hero of the day—a personage of not only local but world historical moment. In a word: the first work of the hero is to retreat from the world scene of secondary effects to those causal zones of the psyche where the difficulties really reside, and there to clarify the difficulties, eradicate them in his own case (i.e., give battle to the nursery demons of his local culture) and break through to the undistorted, direct experience and assimilation of what C. G. Jung called "the archetypal images." This is the process known to Hindu and Buddhist philosophy as viveka, "discrimination."

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.

When you follow your bliss...doors will open where you would not have thought there would be doors, and where there wouldn't be a door for anyone else.

The multitude of men and women choose the less adventurous way of the comparatively unconscious civic and tribal routines. But these seekers, too, are saved—by the virtue of the inherited symbolic aids of society, the rites of passage, the grace-yielding sacraments, given to mankind of old by the redeemers and handed down through the millenniums. It is only those who know neither an inner call nor an outer doctrine whose plight is truly desperate; that is to say, most of us today, in this labyrinth without and within the heart. Alas, where is the guide, that fond virgin, Ariadne, to supply the simple clue that will give us the courage to face the Minotaur, and the means to find our way to freedom when the monster has been met and slain?