Joseph Campbell Quotes

“It is not society which is to guide and save the creative hero, but precisely the reverse.”

“Not all who hesitate are lost. The psyche has many secrets in reserve. And these are not disclosed unless required.”

“Your sacred space is where you can find yourself again and again.”

“Do what gives you bliss.”

“What the artist must render is a living moment somehow, a living moment actually in action or an inward experience.”

“Where is your bliss station? You have to try to find it.”

“It [music] has an awakening function. Life is a rhythm. Art is an organization of rhythms. Music is a fundamental art that touches our will system. In Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Idea he speaks of music as the sound that awakens the will. The rhythm of the music awakens certain life rhythms, ways of living and experiencing life. So it's an awakener of life.”

“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.”

“Love your enemies, for they determine who you are.”

“Man actually needs the striving and struggling for some goal worthy of him.”

“The hero, therefore, is the man or woman who has been able to battle past his personal and local historical limitations.”

“You are the Hero of your own Story.”

“The courage to face the trials and to bring a whole new body of possibilities into the field of interpreted experience for other people to experience - that is the hero's deed.”

“Every moment is utterly unique and will not be continued in eternity. This fact gives life its poignancy and should concentrate your attention on what you are experiencing now...that source of eternal energy is here, in you, now.”

“You must have a room, or a certain hour or so a day, where you don't know what was in the newspapers that morning a place where you can simply experience and bring forth what you are and what you might be.”

“How teach again, however, what has been taught correctly and incorrectly learned a thousand thousand times, throughout the millenniums of mankind's prudent folly? That is the hero's ultimate difficult task.”

“The unconscious sends all sorts of vapors, odd beings, terrors, and deluding images up into the mind - whether in dream, broad daylight, or insanity: for the human kingdom, beneath the floor of the comparatively neat little dwelling that we call our consciousness, goes down into unsuspected Aladdin caves.”

“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.”

“The quest for fire occurred not because anyone knew what the practical uses for fire would be, but because it was fascinating.”

“The function of (heroic) symbols is to give you a sense of Aha! Yes, I know what it is, it's myself.”

“The ultimate dragon is within you, it is your ego clamping you down.”

“The ultimate aim of the quest must be neither release nor ecstasy for oneself, but the wisdom and the power to serve others.”

“A hero is someone who has given his or her life to something bigger than oneself.”

“Questing... is not an ego trip; it is an adventure to bring into fulfillment your gift to the world, which is yourself.”

“If you go to a master to study and learn the techniques, you diligently follow all the instructions the master puts upon you. But then comes the time for using the rules in your own way and not being bound by them....You can actually forget the rules because they have been assimilated. You are an artist. Your own innocence now is of one who has become an artist, who has been, as it were, transmuted.... You can't have creativity unless you leave behind the bounded, the fixed, all the rules.”