Metaphysics yields to prehistory, which is dim and vague at first, but becomes gradually precise in detail. The heroes become less and less fabulous, until at last, in the final stages of the various local traditions, legend opens into the common daylight of recorded time.

— Joseph Campbell

Joseph Campbell Quotes

Giving birth is definitely a heroic deed, in that it is the giving over of oneself to the life of another.

— Joseph Campbell

Though omnipotence may seem to be endangered by the threshold passages and life awakenings, protective power is always and ever present within the sanctuary of the heart and even immanent within, or just behind, the unfamiliar features of the world. One has only to know and trust, and the ageless guardians will appear. Having responded to his own call, and continuing to follow courageously as the consequences unfold, the hero finds all the forces of the unconscious at his side.

— Joseph Campbell

Wherever a hero has been born, has wrought, or has passed back into the void, the place is marked and sanctified. A temple is erected there to signify and inspire the miracle of perfect centeredness; for this is the place of the breakthrough into abundance. Someone at this point discovered eternity.

— Joseph Campbell

The realm of the gods is a forgotten dimension of the world we know. And the exploration of that dimension, either willingly or unwillingly, is the whole sense of the deed of the hero. The values and distinctions that in normal life seem important disappear with the terrifying assimilation of the self into what formerly was only otherness.

— Joseph Campbell

But if we are to grasp the full value of the materials, we must note that myths are not exactly comparable to dream. Their figures originate from the same sources – the unconscious wells of fantasy – and their grammar is the same, but they are not the spontaneous products of sleep. On the contrary their patterns are consciously controlled. And their understood function is to serve as powerful picture language for the communication of traditional wisdom.

— Joseph Campbell

From the standpoint of the Olympians, eon after eon of earthly history rolls by, revealing ever the harmonious form of the total round, so that where men see only change and death, the blessed behold immutable form, world without end. But now the problem is to maintain this cosmic standpoint in the face of an immediate earthly pain or joy.

— Joseph Campbell

Apparently the most permanent of the dispositions of the human psyche are those that derive from the fact that, of all animals, we remain the longest at the mother breast.

— Joseph Campbell

The adventure of the hero represents the moment in his life when he achieved illumination – the nuclear moment when, while still alive, he found and opened the road to the light beyond the dark walls of our living death.

— Joseph Campbell

The hero, the waker of his own soul, is himself but the convenient means of his own dissolution.

— Joseph Campbell

From the perspective of the source, the world is a majestic harmony of forms pouring into being, exploding, and dissolving. But what the swiftly passing creatures experience is a terrible cacophony of battle cries and pain.

— Joseph Campbell

Human beings are born too soon; they are unfinished, unready as yet to meet the world. Consequently their whole defense from a universe of dangers is the mother, under whose protection the intra-uterine period is prolonged.

— Joseph Campbell

Nevertheless, every failure to cope with a life situation must be laid, in the end, to a restriction of consciousness. Wars and temper tantrums are the makeshifts of ignorance; regrets are illuminations come too late.

— Joseph Campbell

Mythologies are in fact the public dreams that move and shape societies, and conversely one’s own dreams are the little myths of the private gods, antigods, and guardian powers that are moving and shaping oneself: revelations of the actual fears, desires, aims, and values by which one’s life is subliminally ordered.

— Joseph Campbell

I was intrigued by the definition of the Force. Ben Kenobi says, “The Force is an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us, it penetrates us, it binds the galaxy together.” And I’ve read in The Hero with a Thousand Faces similar descriptions of the world navel, of the sacred place, of the power that is at the moment of creation.

— Joseph Campbell

Mythology is the song. It is the song of the imagination, inspired by the energies of the body.

— Joseph Campbell

And more important, all the life-potentialities that we never managed to bring to adult realization, those other portions of ourself, are there; for such golden seeds do not die. If only a portion of that lost totality could be dredged up into the light of day, we should experience a marvelous expansion of our powers, a vivid renewal of life.

— Joseph Campbell

The unpardonable sin, in Campbell’s book, was the sin of inadvertence, of not being alert, not quite awake.

— Joseph Campbell

The Fantasy is a reassurance – a promise that the peace of Paradise... is not to be lost...

— Joseph Campbell

Dream is the personalized myth, myth is the depoersonalized dream; both myth and dream are symbolic in the same general way of the dynamics of the psyche.

— Joseph Campbell

But the mistery of the woman is no less a mystery than death. Childbirth is no less a mystery; nor the flow of the mother’s milk; nor the menstrual cycle -in its accord with the moon. The creative magic of the female body is a thing of wonder in itself.

— Joseph Campbell
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