Quote

If we fix on the old, we get stuck.

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
Stuck

More quotes by Joseph Campbell

Image
There's something inside you that knows when you're in the center, that knows when you're on the beam or off the beam. And if you get off the beam to earn money, you've lost your life. And if you stay in the center and don't get any money, you still have your bliss.
Joseph Campbell
Image
The demon that you can swallow gives you it’s power, and the greater life’s pain, the greater life’s reply.
Joseph Campbell
Image
There's nothing you can do that's more important than being fulfilled. You become a sign, you become a signal, transparent to transcendence in this way, you will find, live, and become a realization of your own personal myth.
Joseph Campbell
Image
Life is but a mask worn on the face of death. And is death, then, but another mask? 'How many can say,' asks the Aztec poet, 'that there is, or is not, a truth beyond?'
Joseph Campbell
Image
We must be willing to get rid of the life we've planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us. The old skin has to be shed before the new one can come. -
Joseph Campbell
Image
There is a condescension on the part of the infinite to the mind of man. That is what looks like God.
Joseph Campbell
Image
The images of Myth are reflections of Spiritual and Depth potentialities of every one of us. Through contemplating those we evoke those powers in our own lives to operate through ourselves.
Joseph Campbell
Image
I don’t think people are really seeking the meaning of Life. I think we’re seeking an experience of being alive…we want to feel the rapture of being alive
Joseph Campbell
Image
Thinking in mythological terms helps to put you in accord with the inevitables of this vale of tears. You learn to recognize the positive values in what appear to be the negative moments and aspects of your life. The big question is whether you are going to be able to say a hearty yes to your adventure.
Joseph Campbell
Image
We are kept out of the Garden by our own fear and desire in relation to what we think to be the goods of our life.
Joseph Campbell
Image
Everything starts with a story.
Joseph Campbell
Image
Myths are clues to the spiritual potentialities of the human life.
Joseph Campbell
Image
People who don't have a concept of the whole can do very unfortunate things.
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
When your mind is simply trapped by the image out there so that you never make the reference to yourself, you have misread the image.
Joseph Campbell
Image
The theme of the Grail is the bringing of life into what is known as 'the wasteland.' The wasteland is the preliminary theme to which the Grail is the answer. . . It's the world of people living inauthentic lives - doing what they are supposed to do.
Joseph Campbell
Image
Dream is personalized myth, myth is depersonalized dream both myth and dream are symbolic in the same general way of the dynamics of the psyche. But in the dream the forms are quirked by the peculiar troubles of the dreamer, whereas in myth the problem and solutions shown are directly valid for all mankind.
Joseph Campbell
Image
The familiar life horizon has been outgrown: the old concepts, ideals, and emotional patterns no longer fit the time for the passing of a threshold is at hand.
Joseph Campbell
Image
I think what we lack isn't science, but poetry that reveals what the heart is ready to recognize
Joseph Campbell
Image
If you can see your path clearly in front of you, it's probably someone else's.
Joseph Campbell