938 Quotes by Joseph Campbell

You don’t have to believe that there was a King Arthur to get the significance of those stories, but Christians say we have to believe there was a Christ, or the miracles don’t make sense.

Now, one of the main problems of mythology is reconciling the mind to this brutal precondition of all life, which lives by the killing and eating of lives. You don’t kid yourself by eating only vegetables, either, for they, too, are alive. So the essence of life is this eating of itself! Life lives on lives, and the reconciliation of the human mind and sensibilities to that fundamental fact.

If you want to understand what’s most important to a society, don’t examine its art or literature, simply look at its biggest buildings.

Life is but a mask worn on the face of death. And is death, then, but another mask? ‘How many can say,’ asks the Aztec poet, ‘that there is, or is not, a truth beyond?’

The water in which the mystic swims is the same water a madman drowns in.

Any god who can invent hell is no candidate for the Salvation Army.

Where there is a way or a path, it’s someone else’s way.

A myth doesn’t have to be real to be true.

And that Aha! that you get when you see an artwork that really hits you is, ‘I am that.’ I am the very radiance of energy that is talking to me through this painting.