Quotes from Joseph Campbell

think of compassion as the fundamental religious experience and, unless that is there, you have nothing.

suffering," he said, "is mortality itself, which is the prime condition of life.

A journalist, it is said, enjoys a license to be educated in public; we are the lucky ones, allowed to spend our days in a continuing course of adult education.

When the mask of Darth Vader is removed, you see an unformed man, one who has not developed as a human individual. What you see is a strange and pitiful sort of undifferentiated face.

this grand and cacophonous chorus began when our primal ancestors told stories to themselves about the animals that they killed for food and about the supernatural world to which the animals seemed to go when they died.

My definition of mythology is "other people's religion," which suggests that ours must be something else. My definition of religion, then, is "misunderstood mythology"—and the misunderstanding consists in mistaking the symbol for the reference.

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

matinees had borrowed freely from those ancient tales. And that the stories we learned in Sunday school corresponded with those of other cultures that recognized the soul's high adventure, the quest of mortals to grasp the reality of God. He helped me to see the connections, to understand how the pieces fit, and not merely to fear less but to welcome what he described as "a mighty multicultural future.

The public hero is sensitive to the needs of his time.

The hero is someone who has given his or her life to something bigger than oneself.

You must understand that each religion is a kind of software that has its own set of signals and will work.

Man was not breathed into the earth. Man came out of the earth.