Quote

I think of compassion as the fundamental religious experience and, unless that is there, you have nothing.

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
Unless
Religious
Experience
Nothing
Think
Thinking
Fundamental
Fundamentals
Compassion

More quotes by Joseph Campbell

Image
Love is the burning point of life, and since all life is sorrowful, so is love. The stronger the love, the more the pain. Love itself is pain, you might say -the pain of being truly alive.
Joseph Campbell
Image
There is no make-believe about heaven, future bliss, and compensation, to alleviate the bitter majesty, but only utter darkness, the void of unfulfillment, to receive and eat back the lives that have been tossed forth from the womb only to fail.
Joseph Campbell
Image
If you're going to have a story, have a big story, or none at all.
Joseph Campbell
Image
The Garden is a metaphor for the following: our minds, and our thinking in terms of pairs of opposites--man and woman, good and evil--are as holy as that of a god. (50)
Joseph Campbell
Image
You can't have creativity unless you leave behind the bounded, the fixed, all the rules
Joseph Campbell
Image
The myth is the public dream and the dream is the private myth.
Joseph Campbell
Image
Marriage is not a love affair. A love affair has to do with immediate personal satisfaction. Marriage is an ordeal it means yielding, time and again. That's why it's a sacrament You give up your personal simplicity to participate in a relationship. And when you're giving, you're not giving to the other person you're giving to the relationship.
Joseph Campbell
Image
For the bliss of the deep abode is not lightly abandoned in favor of the self-scattering of the wakened state.
Joseph Campbell
Image
You are the Hero of your own Story.
Joseph Campbell
Image
And so Galahad decided that it would be a disgrace to set off on a quest with the other knights. Alone he would enter the dark forest where there was no path. This is the myth of The Hero's Journey.
Joseph Campbell
Image
What's made up in the head is the fiction. What comes out of the heart is a myth.
Joseph Campbell
Image
If you follow someone else's way, you are not going to realize your potential.
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
Where you stumble and fall, there you will find gold.
Joseph Campbell
Image
The ultimate dreamer is Vishnu floating on the cosmic Milky Ocean, couched upon the coils of the abyssal serpent Ananta, the meaning of whose name is Unending. In the foreground stand the five Pandava brothers, heroes of the epic Mahabharata, with Draupadi, their wife: allegorically, she is the mind and they are the five senses.
Joseph Campbell
Image
If you want to find out what it means to have a society without any rituals, read the New York Times.
Joseph Campbell
Image
Man actually needs the striving and struggling for some goal worthy of him.
Joseph Campbell
Image
When you follow your bliss, you begin to meet people who are in the field of your bliss, and they open the doors to you.
Joseph Campbell
Image
This is an essential experience of any mystical realization. You die to your flesh and are born into your spirit. You identify yourself with the consciousness and life of which your body is but the vehicle. You die to the vehicle and become identified in your consciousness with that of which the vehicle is but the carrier. That is the God.
Joseph Campbell
Image
All life stinks and you must embrace that with compassion.
Joseph Campbell