Quote

The mighty hero of extraordinary powers, able to lift Mount Govardhan on a finger, and to fill himself with the terrible glory of the universe, is each of us: not the physical self visible in the mirror, but the King within.

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
Hero
Mirror
Glory
Powers
Mount
Terrible
Mirrors
Finger
Within
King
Mighty
Universe
Fingers
Lift
Able
Extraordinary
Lifts
Self
Kings
Fill
Physical
Visible

More quotes by Joseph Campbell

Image
How does the ordinary person come to the transcendent? For a start, I would say, study poetry. Learn how to read a poem. You need not have the experience to get the message, or at least some indication of the message. It may come gradually. (92)
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
What we are really living for is the experience of life, both the pain and the pleasure.
Joseph Campbell
Image
A woman is a vehicle of life. Life has overtaken her. Woman is what it is all about-the giving of birth and the giving of nourishment.
Joseph Campbell
Image
Money is congealed energy, and releasing it releases life's possibilities.
Joseph Campbell
Image
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
Image
You must have a place to which you can go in your heart, your mind, or your house, almost every day, where you do not owe anyone and where no one owes you - a place that simply allows for the blossoming of something new and promising.
Joseph Campbell
Image
The myth does not point to a fact the myth points beyond facts to something that informs the fact
Joseph Campbell
Image
Every act has both good and evil results. The best we can do is lean to the light.
Joseph Campbell
Image
If you really want to help this world, what you will have to teach is how to live in it.
Joseph Campbell
Image
The world is full of people who have stopped listening to themselves.
Joseph Campbell
Image
Mythology is the womb of mankind's initiation to life and death.
Joseph Campbell
Image
I think of compassion as the fundamental religious experience and, unless that is there, you have nothing.
Joseph Campbell
Image
The perfect human being is uninteresting-the Buddha who leaves the world, you know. It is the imperfections of life that are lovable.
Joseph Campbell
Image
The seizure of passionate love can be, in such a context, only illicit, breaking in upon the order of one's dutiful life in virtue as a devastating storm.
Joseph Campbell
Image
Opportunities to find deeper powers within ourselves come when life seems most challenging.
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
Change the focus of the eye. When you have done that, then the end of the world as you formerly knew it will have occurred, and you will experience the radiance of the divine presence everywhere, here and now.
Joseph Campbell
Image
If you are to advance, all fixed ideas must go.
Joseph Campbell
Image
Life is a guy trying to play a violin solo in public, while learning the music and his instrument at the same time.
Joseph Campbell