938 Quotes by Joseph Campbell

He who thinks he knows, doesn’t know. He who knows that he doesn’t know, knows.

If you’re going to have a story, have a big story, or none at all.

Heroism is a matter of integrity – beco ming more and more at each step ourselves.

What’s made up in the head is the fiction. What comes out of the heart is a myth.

A priest is a functionary of a social sort. The society worships certain deities in a certain way, and the priest becomes ordained as a functionary to carry out that ritual. The deity to whom he is devoted is a deity that was there before he came along. But the shaman’s powers are symbolized in his own familiars, deities of his own personal experience. His authority comes out of a psychological experience, not a social ordination.

Wisdom and foolishness are practically the same. Both are indifferent to the opinions of the world.

How to teach again what has been taught correctly it incorrectly 1000 thousand times, throughout the millenniums of mankind’s prudent folly? That is the hero’s ultimate difficult task. How to render back into light-world language the speech-defying pronouncements of the dark? Many failures attest to the difficulties of this life-affirmative threshold.

The realms of the gods and demons – heaven, purgatory, hell – are of the substance of dreams. Myth, in this view, is the dream of the world.

I think the person who takes a job in order to live – that is to say, for the money – has turned himself into a slave.