Joseph Campbell Quotes

“Your adventure has to be coming out of your own interior. If you are ready for it then doors will open where there were no doors before, and where there would not be doors for anyone else. And you must have courage. It's the call to adventure, which means there is no security, no rules.”

“Whatever the hell happens, say, 'This is what I need.'”

“When you are in accord with nature, nature will yield its bounty. This is something that is coming up in our own consciousness now...recognizi ng that by violating the environment in which we are living, we are really cutting off the energy and source of our own living. And it’s this sense of accord, so that living properly in relation to what has to be done in this world one fosters the vitality of the environment.”

“The adventure is always and everywhere a passage beyond the veil of the known into the unknown; the powers that watch at the boundary are dangerous; to deal with them is risky; yet for anyone with competence and courage the danger fades.”

“When you find a writer who really is saying something to you, read everything that writer has written and you will get more education and depth of understanding out of that than reading a scrap here and a scrap there and elsewhere. Then go to people who influenced that writer, or those who were related to him, and your world builds together in an organic way that is really marvelous.”

“There is no way you can use the word “reality” without quotation marks around it.”

“For the bliss of the deep abode is not lightly abandoned in favor of the self-scattering of the wakened state.”

“We are the consciousness of the earth. We are the eyes of the earth. The voice of the earth.”

“The process of nature cannot be evil.”

“You've got to say yes to this miracle of life as it is, not on condition that it follow your rules.”

“You have to learn to recognize your own depth.”

“Eternity is not future or past. Eternity is a dimension of now.”

“Money is congealed energy, and releasing it releases life's possibilities.”

“The principle of compassion is that which converts disillusionment into a participatory companionship. This is the basic love, the charity, that turns a critic into a living human being who has something to give to - as well as to demand of - the world.”

“First you must find your trajectory, and then comes the social coordination.”

“When an idea is important to a person or culture it will find its way into imagery.”

“For we have not even to risk the adventure alone, for the heros of all time have gone before us.”

“Out of perfection nothing can be made. Every process involves breaking something up. The earth must be broken to bring forth life. If the seed does not die there is no plant. Bread results from the death of wheat. Life lives on lives. Our own life lives on the acts of other people. If you are lifeworthy, you can take it.”

“The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are.”

“Wars and temper tantrums are the makeshifts of ignorance; regrets are illuminations come too late.”

“Poets are simply those who have made a profession and a lifestyle of being in touch with their bliss.”

“Our life has become so economic and practical in its orientation that, as you get older, the claims of the moment upon you are so great, you hardly know where the hell you are, or what it is you intended. You are always doing something that is required of you. Where is your bliss station? You have to try to find it.”

“For if anything is capable of making a poet of a literary man, it is my hometown love of the human, the living and ordinary.”

“You know, when real trouble comes your humanity is awakened. The fundamental human experience is that of compassion.”

“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.”