Quote

Writer’s block results from too much head. Cut off your head. Pegasus, poetry, was born of Medusa when her head was cut off. You have to be reckless when writing. Be as crazy as your conscience allows.

Joseph Campbell

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Joseph Campbell
Age: 83 †
Born: 1904
Born: March 26
Died: 1987
Died: October 30
Academic
Anthropologist
Essayist
Ethnologist
Historian
Historian Of Religion
Lecturer
Mythologist
Orator
Researcher
Short Story Writer
White Plains
New York
Joseph John Campbell
Joseph Cambell
Crazy
Medusa
Results
Reckless
Head
Allows
Born
Block
Inspirational
Conscience
Writing
Cutting
Much
Poetry
Writer
Pegasus

More quotes by Joseph Campbell

Image
We have to permit go with the everyday living we had prepared so as to have the lifetime that's watching for us
Joseph Campbell
Image
The entire heavenly realm is within us, but to find it we have to relate to what's outside.
Joseph Campbell
Image
A dream is your creative vision for your life in the future. A goal is what specifically you intend to make happen. Dreams and goals should be just out of your present reach but not out of sight. Dreams and goals are coming attractions in your life.
Joseph Campbell
Image
The perfect human being is uninteresting.
Joseph Campbell
Image
The senses are a kind of reason. Taste, touch and smell, hearing and seeing, are not merely a means to sensation, enjoyable or otherwise, but they are also a means to knowledge - and are, indeed, your only actual means to knowledge.
Joseph Campbell
Image
Every religion, every mythology is true in this sense: It is true as metaphorical of the human and cosmic mystery.
Joseph Campbell
Image
I don’t think there is any such thing as an ordinary mortal. Everybody has his own possibility of rapture in the experience of life. All he has to do is recognize it and then cultivate it and get going with it. I always feel uncomfortable when people speak about ordinary mortals because I’ve never met an ordinary man, woman, or child.
Joseph Campbell
Image
All the old bindings are broken. Cosmological centers now are anywhere and everywhere. The earth is a heavenly body, most beautiful of all, and all poetry is now archaic that fails to match the wonder of this view.
Joseph Campbell
Image
The principle of compassion is that which converts disillusionment into a participatory companionship. This is the basic love, the charity, that turns a critic into a living human being who has something to give to - as well as to demand of - the world.
Joseph Campbell
Image
Man should not be in the service of society, society should be in the service of man. When man is in the service of society, you have a monster state, and that's what is threatening the world at this minute.
Joseph Campbell
Image
A one sentence definition of mythology? Mythology is what we call someone else's religion.
Joseph Campbell
Image
You don't have to believe that there was a King Arthur to get the significance of those stories, but Christians say we have to believe there was a Christ, or the miracles don't make sense.
Joseph Campbell
Image
Our life has become so economic and practical in its orientation that, as you get older, the claims of the moment upon you are so great, you hardly know where the hell you are, or what it is you intended. You are always doing something that is required of you. Where is your bliss station? You have to try to find it.
Joseph Campbell
Image
Myths are so intimately bound to culture, time, and place that unless the symbols, the metaphors, are kept alive by constant recreation through the arts, the life just slips away from them.
Joseph Campbell
Image
Poets are simply those who have made a profession and a lifestyle of being in touch with their bliss.
Joseph Campbell
Image
Perfection isn't human. Human beings are not perfect. What evokes our love--and I mean love, not lust--is the imperfection of the human being. So, when the imperfection of the real person peaks through, say, 'This is a challenge to my compassion.' Then make a try, and something might begin to get going.
Joseph Campbell
Image
What is unknown is the fulfillment of your own unique life, the likes of which has never existed on earth. And you are the only one who can do it. People can give you clues how to fall and when to stand, and when you are falling and when you are standing, this only you can know. And in the way of your own talents is the only way to do it.
Joseph Campbell
Image
The folktale is the primer of the picture-language of the soul.
Joseph Campbell
Image
What is a god? A god is a personification of a motivating power of a value system that functions in human life and in the universe.
Joseph Campbell
Image
If you are to advance, all fixed ideas must go.
Joseph Campbell