Joseph Campbell Quotes

“People forget facts, but they remember stories.”

“Follow your bliss. The heroic life is living the individual adventure.”

“The adventure of the hero is the adventure of being alive”

“Poets and artists who speak of the mystery are rare.”

“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.”

“Economics and politics are the governing powers of life today, and that's why everything is so screwy.”

“Love is a friendship set to music.”

“The insecure way is the secure way.”

“If you do follow your bliss you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living... Follow your bliss and don't be afraid, and doors will open where you didn't know they were going to be.”

“When we quit thinking primarily about ourselves and our own self-preservation, we undergo a truly heroic transformation of consciousness.”

“Revolution doesn't have to do with smashing something, it has to do with bringing something forth. If you spend all your time thinking about that which you are attacking, then you are negatively bound to it. You have to find the zeal in yourself and bring that out.”

“If you are to advance, all fixed ideas must go.”

“At the darkest moment comes the light.”

“Your own path you make with every step you take. That's why it's your path.”

“If you are falling....dive.”

“What if we choose not to do the things we are supposed to do? The principal gain is a sense of an authentic act - and an authentic life. It may be a short one, but it is an authentic one, and that's a lot better than those short lives full of boredom. The principal loss is security. Another is respect from the community. But you gain the respect of another community, the one that is worth having the respect of.”

“Survival is the second law of life. The first is that we are all one.”

“You can't have creativity unless you leave behind the bounded, the fixed, all the rules”

“Life will always be sorrowful. We can't change it, but we can change our attitude toward it.”

“You don't ask what a dance means. You enjoy it. You don't ask what the world means. You enjoy it. You don't ask what you mean. You enjoy it.”

“Every act has both good and evil results. The best we can do is lean to the light.”

“If you have the guts to follow the risk...if one follows what I call one's "bliss" - the thing that really gets you deep in the gut and that you feel is your life - doors will open up...if you follow your bliss, you'll have your bliss, whether you have money or not.”

“Our life evokes our character. You find out more about yourself as you go on. That's why it's good to put yourself in situations that will evoke your higher nature rather than your lower.”

“Now I found it in writing sentences. You can write that sentence in a way that you would have written it last year. Or you can write it in the way of the exquisite nuance that is sriting in your mind now. But that takes a lot of ... waiting for the right word to come.”

“It is by going down into the abyss that we recover the treasures of life. Where you stumble, there lies your treasure.”