Quote

Everything starts with a story.

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
Starts
Story
Stories
Everything

More quotes by Joseph Campbell

Image
Your ego is your embodiment and your self is your potentiality and that's what you listen to when you listen for the voice of inspiration and the voice of 'What am I here for? What can I possibly make of myself?'
Joseph Campbell
Image
You have been thinking one way. Now you have to think a different way.
Joseph Campbell
Image
What am I? Am I the bulb that carries the light, or am I the light of which the bulb is a vehicle?
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
If you want the whole thing, the gods will give it to you. But you must be ready for it.
Joseph Campbell
Image
Myths are public dreams, dreams are private myths. We must be willing to get rid of the life we planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us. I have bought this wonderful machine — a computer ... it seems to me to be an Old Testament god, with a lot of rules and no mercy.
Joseph Campbell
Image
I think of mythology as the homeland of the muses, the inspirers of art, the inspirers of poetry. To see life as a poem and yourself participating in a poem is what the myth does for you.
Joseph Campbell
Image
The inner world is the world of your requirements and your energies and your structure and your possibilities that meets the outer world. And the outer world is the field of your incarnation. That’s where you are. You’ve got to keep both going. As Novalis said, ‘The seat of the soul is there where the inner and outer worlds meet.
Joseph Campbell
Image
You enter the forest at the darkest point, where there is no path. Where there is a way or path, it is someone else's path. You are not on your own path. If you follow someone else's way, you are not going to realize your potential.
Joseph Campbell
Image
In the absence of an effective general mythology, each of us has his private, unrecognized, rudimentary, yet secretly potent pantheon of dreams.
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
We need myths that will identify the individual not with his local group but with the planet.
Joseph Campbell
Image
Midlife is when you reach the top of the ladder and find that it was against the wrong wall.
Joseph Campbell
Image
The seat of the soul is where the inner world and the outer world meet.
Joseph Campbell
Image
There are now no more horizons. And with the dissolution of horizons we have experienced and are experiencing collisions, terrific collisions, not only of peoples but also of their mythologies. It is as when dividing panels are withdrawn from between chambers of very hot and very cold airs: there is a rush of these forces together.
Joseph Campbell
Image
What is required is the finding of that Immovable Point within one's self, which is not shaken by any of those tempests which the Buddhists call 'the eight karmic winds': 1-fear of pain, 2-desire for pleasure 3-fear of loss 4-desire for gain 5-fear of blame, 6-desire for praise 7-fear of disgrace [and] 8-desire for fame.
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
You have to have a feeling for where you are. You've got only one life to live and you don't have to live it for six people. Pay attention to it.
Joseph Campbell
Image
One of our problems today is that we are not well acquainted with the literature of the spirit. We re interested in the news of the day and the problems of the hour.
Joseph Campbell
Image
One way or another, we all have to find what best fosters the flowering of our humanity in this contemporary life, and dedicate ourselves to that.
Joseph Campbell