Joseph Campbell Quotes

“When people find out what it is that's ticking in them, they get straightened out.”

“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.”

“There is no security in following the call to adventure.”

“Participate joyfully in the sorrows of life”

“No one in the world was ever you before, with your particular gifts and abilities and possibilities.”

“The perfect human being is uninteresting.”

“Each of us has capacities. The real trick is knowing the machinery of the boat in which you are crossing the channel.”

“Our true reality is in our identity and unity with all life.”

“Where there is a way or path, it is someone else's. Each of us has to find his own way.”

“A hero is not a champion of things become, but of things becoming; the dragon to be slain by him is precisely the monster of the status quo.”

“Men sometimes confess they love war because it puts them in touch with the experience of being alive. In going to the office every day, you don't get that experience, but suddenly in war, you are ripped back into being alive. Life is pain; life is suffering; and life is horror - but, by God, you are alive.”

“...suddenly you hit on something that the student really responds to, you can see the eyes open and the complexion change. The life possibility has opened there. All you can say to yourself is, "I hope this child hangs on to that."”

“A real artist is the one who has learned to recognize and to render...the 'radiance' of all things as an epiphany or showing forth of the truth.”

“Don't do anything that isn't play”

“Art is the clothing of a revelation”

“When we talk about settling the world's problems, we're barking up the wrong tree. The world is perfect. It's a mess. It has always been a mess. We're not going to change it. Our job is to straighten out our own lives.”

“Successful marriage is leading innovative lives together, being open, non-programmed. It’s a free fall: how you handle each new thing as it comes along. As a drop of oil on the sea, you must float, using intellect and compassion to ride the waves.”

“The best we can do is lean towards the light.”

“If the path before you is clear, you're probably on someone else's.”

“Eternity isn't some later time. Eternity isn't a long time. Eternity has nothing to do with time. Eternity is that dimension of here and now which thinking and time cuts out. This is it. And if you don't get it here, you won't get it anywhere. And the experience of eternity right here and now is the function of life.”

“The ground of being is the ground of our being, and when we simply turn outward, we see all of these little problems here and there. But, if we look inward, we see that we are the source of them all.”

“Well, one of the problems about being psychoanalyzed is, as Nietzsche said, "Be careful lest in casting out your devils that you cast out the best thing that's in you." So many people who are really in deep analysis look as though and act as though they have been filleted. There's no bone there, there's no stuff! How to get rid of ego as dictator and turn it into messenger and servant and scout, to be in your service, is the trick.”

“The job of an educator is to teach students to see vitality in themselves”

“When you realize that eternity is right here now, that it is within your possibility to experience the eternity of your own truth and being, then you grasp the following: That which you are was never born and will never die. . . . (90)”

“The problem in our society and in our schools is to inclulcate, without overdoing it, the notion of education, as in the Latin educere--to lead, to bring out what is in someone rather than merely to indoctrinate him/her from the outside. (89)”