938 Quotes by Joseph Campbell


  • Author Joseph Campbell
  • Quote

    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.

  • Tags
  • Share

  • Author Joseph Campbell
  • Quote

    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.The whole sense of the ubiquitous myth of the hero’s passage is that it shall serve as a general pattern for men and women...The individual has only to discover his own position with reference to this general human formula, and let it then assist him past his restricting walls. 

  • Tags
  • Share


  • Author Joseph Campbell
  • Quote

    You really can't follow a guru. You can't ask somebody to give The Reason, but you can find one for yourself; you decide what the meaning of your life is to be. People talk about the meaning of life; there is no meaning of life--there are lots of meanings of different lives, and you must decide what you want your own to be.

  • Tags
  • Share


  • Author Joseph Campbell
  • Quote

    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.

  • Tags
  • Share

  • Author Joseph Campbell
  • Quote

    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.

  • Tags
  • Share