Quotes from Joseph Campbell

What is the kingdom [of God]? it lies in our realization of the ubiquity of the divine presence in our neighbors, in our enemies, in all of us.

And so the impulses of nature are what give authenticity to life, not obeying rules come from a supernatural authority, that's the sense of the Grail.

The passage to fulfillment lies between the perils of desire and fear.

The symbols of mythology are not manufactured; they cannot be ordered, invented, or permanently suppressed. They are spontaneous productions of the psyche.

To evolve out of this position of psychological immaturity to the courage of self-responsibility and assurance requires a death and a resurrection. That's the basic motif of the universal hero's journey—leaving one condition and finding the source of life to bring you forth into a richer or mature condition.

Mythology -and therefore civilization- is a poetic, supernormal image, conceived, like all poetry, in depth, but susceptible of interpretation on various levels.

All the gods, all the heavens, all the worlds, are within us.

Great is the gate and narrow is the way which leadeth to life, and few there be who find it." And

there is a fourth function of myth, and this is the one that I think everyone must try today to relate to—and that is the pedagogical function, of how to live a human lifetime under any circumstances. Myths can teach you that.

So the essence of life is this eating of itself! Life lives on lives

God is separate from nature, and nature is condemned of God. It's right there in Genesis: we are to be the masters of the world. But if you will think of ourselves as coming out of the earth, rather than having been thrown in here from somewhere else, you see that we are the earth, we are the consciousness of the earth.

What I think is that a good life is one hero journey after another. Over and over again, you are called to the realm of adventure, you are called to new horizons. Each time, there is the same problem: do I dare? And then if you do dare, the dangers are there, and the help also, in the fulfillment or the fiasco. There's always the possibility of a fiasco. But there's also the possibility of bliss.