Quotes from Joseph Campbell

It would not be too much to say that myth is the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into the human cultural manifestation.

What can't be known or named except in our feeble attempt to clothe it in language.

Now you can see today why the world is in trouble. What is the social field today? The social field is the planet, and there isn't a single system of action that has to do with the planet. They all have to do with one interest group or another.

If you 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. Wherever you are—if you are following your bliss, you are enjoying that refreshment, that life within you, all the time.

shuffled off this mortal coil.

It is not society that is to guide and save the creative hero, but precisely the reverse. And so every one of us shares the supreme ordeal --carries the cross of the redeemer--not in the bright moments of his tribe's great victories, but in the silences of his personal despair.

Myths inspire the realization of the possibility of your perfection, the fullness of your strength, and the bringing of solar light into the world. Slaying monsters is slaying the dark things. Myths grab you somewhere down inside.

Eternity isn't some later time. Eternity isn't some long time. Eternity has nothing to do with time. Eternity is that dimension between here and now, where thinking and time cuts out. If you won't get it here, you won't get it anywhere. The experience of eternity is right here and now is the function of life.

The boy answers, Don't ask unless you are willing to be hurt. Indra says, I ask. Teach. (That, by the way, is a good Oriental idea: you don't teach until you are asked. You don't force your mission down people's throats.)

Yahweh—a jealous god, who would hold men to himself and who turned mankind away from the Tree of Immortality, instead of leading us to it. Such a god in the Orient would be regarded as a deluding idol.

Beirut. What does that say to you? CAMPBELL: It says to me that they don't know how to apply their religious ideas to contemporary life, and to human beings rather than just to their own community. It's a terrible example of the failure of religion to meet the modern world.

MOYERS: A new king or new queen of England is given the coronation ring. CAMPBELL: Yes, because there's another aspect of the ring—it is a bondage. As king, you are bound to a principle. You are living not simply your own way. You have been marked. In initiation rites, when people are sacrificed and tattooed, they are bonded to another and to the society.