Joseph Campbell Quotes

“Passion makes most psychiatrists nervous”

“There is what I would call the hero journey, the night sea journey, the hero quest, where the individual is going to bring forth in his life something that was never beheld before.”

“The hero journey is a symbol that binds, in the original sense of the word, two distant ideas, the spiritual quest of the ancients with the modern search for identity.”

“The journey of the hero is about the courage to seek the depths; the image of creative rebirth; the eternal cycle of change within us; the uncanny discovery that the seeker is the mystery which the seeker seeks to know.”

“The call to adventure signifies that destiny has summoned the hero and transferred his spiritual center of gravity from within the pale of this society to a zone unknown.”

“When I was about eleven I had read all the books about Indians in the children’s library and was actually admitted to the stacks. I remember coming home from the library with stacks of books. And I think that’s where my life as a scholar began. I know it did.”

“By the time I was thirteen I knew about as much about American Indians as a good many anthropologists that I have met since.”

“By the time he was twelve he was voraciously reading books about American Indians. He soon recognized the parallels between these stories and those of his own Roman Catholic tradition, a discovery that would fire a cross-cultural study in the arcane discipline of mythology for the rest of his life.”

“In the summer of 1922 a family friend gave him a biography of Leonardo da Vinci that so inspired him he transferred to Columbia University to ‘shift my interest from science to cultural history’ and the humanities.”

“My parents found a lovely place in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania. [...] This beautiful place became my real discovery of nature. My emphasis on biology and nature and the body in my writing about myth comes out of those years.”

“Along about 1917, and right nearby was a man whose books about Indians I had been reading.”

“I went to school and had no problems with my studies, but my own enthusiasm was in this maverick realm of the American Indian mythologies.”

“They know the sociological interpretations of why the Indians are the way they are or were, but they don’t know much about Indians. And I did know.”

“Just as anyone who listens to the muse will hear, you can write out of your own intention or out of inspiration. There is such a thing. It comes up and talks. And those who have heard deeply the rhythms and hymns of the gods, can recite those hymns in such a way that the gods will be attracted.”

“You can get a lot of work done if you stay with it and are excited and its play instead of work.”

“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.”

“Now I found it in writing sentences. You can write that sentence in a way that you would have written it last year. Or you can write it in the way of the exquisite nuance that is sitting in your mind now. But that takes a lot of ... waiting for the right word to come.”

“They thought that it would be a disgrace to go forth as a group. Each entered the forest at a point that he himself had chosen, where it was darkest and there was no path. If there is a path it is someone else’s path and you are not on the adventure.”

“The ego is as you think of yourself. You in relation to all the commitments of your life, as you understand them. The self is the whole range of possibilities that you’ve never even thought of. And you’re stuck with you’re past when you’re stuck with the ego. Because if all you know about yourself is what you found out about yourself, well, that already happened. The self is a whole field of potentialities to come through.”

“The fundamental human experience is that of compassion.”