03c. 1945 ADWith passion you want to possess. The conversion of passion into compassion is the whole problem of marriage.Joseph Campbell / quote ↗
04c. 1945 ADThe imitation of Christ is the joyful participation in the sorrows of the world.Joseph Campbell / quote ↗
05c. 1945 ADThey 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.Joseph Campbell / quote ↗
06c. 1945 ADThe boy answers, "Don't ask unless you are willing to be hurt."Indra says, "I ask. Teach." (That, by the way, is a good Oriental idea: you don't teach until you are asked. You don't force your mission down people's throats.)Joseph Campbell / quote ↗
07c. 1945 ADThere were formerly horizons within which people lived and thought and mythologized. There are now no more horizons. And with the dissolution of horizons we have experienced and are experiencing collisions, terrific collisions, not only of peoples but also of their mythologies. It is as when dividing panels are withdrawn from between chambers of very hot and very cold airs: there is a rush of these forces together. And so we are right now in an extremely perilous age of thunder, lightning, and hurricanes all around. I think it is improper to become hysterical about it, projecting hatred and blame. It is an inevitable, altogether natural thing that when energies that have never met before come into collision—each bearing its own pride—there should be turbulence. That is just what we are experiencing; and we are riding it: riding it to a new age, a new birth, a totally new condition of mankind—to which no one anywhere alive today can say that he has the key, the answer, the prophecy, to its dawn. Nor is there anyone to condemn here (”Judge not, that you may not be judged!”). What is occurring is completely natural, as are its pains, confusions, and mistakes.Joseph Campbell / quote ↗
08c. 1945 ADWhen you don't have a job (requiring reading) and you are doing your own reading you've got deep psychological questions. As deep as those of a little boy.Joseph Campbell / quote ↗
09c. 1945 ADReading what you want, and having one book lead to the next, is the way I found my discipline.Joseph Campbell / quote ↗
10c. 1945 ADThe hero, the waker of his own soul, is himself but the convenient means of his own dissolution.Joseph Campbell / quote ↗
11c. 1945 ADLife has no meaning. Each of us has meaning and we bring it to life. It is a waste to be asking the question when you are the answer.Joseph Campbell / quote ↗
12c. 1945 ADI would say that all our sciences are the material that has to be mythologized. A mythology gives spiritual import - what one might call rather the psychological, inward import, of the world of nature round about us, as understood today. There's no real conflict between science and religion ... What is in conflict is the science of 2000 BC ... and the science of the 20th century AD.Joseph Campbell / quote ↗
13c. 1945 ADI think the person who takes a job in order to live - that is to say, for the money [not for purpose or passion]- has turned himself into a slave.Joseph Campbell / quote ↗
14c. 1945 ADWhat each must seek in his life never was on land or sea. It is something out of his own unique potentiality for experience, something that never has been and never could have been experienced by anyone else.Joseph Campbell / quote ↗
15c. 1945 ADPoets are simply those who have made a profession ans a lifestyle of being in touch with their bliss.Joseph Campbell / quote ↗
16c. 1945 ADMythology is not a lie, mythology is poetry, it is metaphorical. It has been well said that mythology is the penultimate truth--penultimate because the ultimate cannot be put into words. It is beyond words. Beyond images, beyond that bounding rim of the Buddhist Wheel of Becoming. Mythology pitches the mind beyond that rim, to what can be known but not told.Joseph Campbell / quote ↗
17c. 1945 ADA ritual is the enactment of a myth. And, by participating in the ritual, you are participating in the myth. And since myth is a projection of the depth wisdom of the psyche, by participating in a ritual, participating in the myth, you are being, as it were, put in accord with that wisdom, which is the wisdom that is inherent within you anyhow. Your consciousness is being re-minded of the wisdom of your own life. I think ritual is terribly important.Joseph Campbell / quote ↗
18c. 1945 ADThe battlefield is symbolic of the field of life, where every creature lives on the death of another. A realization of the inevitable guilt of life may so sicken the heart, that like Hamlet, or like Arjuna, one may refuse to go on with it. On the other hand, like most of the rest of us, one may invent a false finally unjustified image of oneself as an exceptional phenomenon in the world--not guilty as others are, but justified in one's inevitable sinning, because one represents the good. Such self-righteousness leads to a misunderstanding, not only of oneself, but of the nature of both Man and the Cosmos. The goal of the myth is to dispel the need for such life-ignorance by affecting a reconciliation of the individual consciousness with the universal will, and this is affected through a realization of the true relationship of the passing phenomena of time to the imperishable life that lives and dies in all.Joseph Campbell / quote ↗
19c. 1945 ADHumor is the touchstone of the truly mythological as distinct from the more literal-minded and sentimental theological mood.Joseph Campbell / quote ↗
20c. 1945 ADWherever the poetry of myth is interpreted as biography, history or science, it is killed.Joseph Campbell / quote ↗
21c. 1945 ADWhen a judge walks into the room, and everybody stands up, you’re not standing up to that guy, you’re standing up to the robe that he’s wearing and the role that he’s going to play. What makes him worthy of that role is his integrity, as a representative of the principles of that role, and not some group of prejudices of his own. So what you’re standing up to is a mythological character. I imagine some kings and queens are the most stupid, absurd, banal people you could run into, probably interested only in horses and women, you know. But you’re not responding to them as personalities, you’re responding to them in their mythological roles. When someone becomes a judge, or President of the United States, the man is no longer that man, he’s the representative of an eternal office; he has to sacrifice his personal desires and even life possibilities to the role that he now signifies.Joseph Campbell / quote ↗
22c. 1945 ADWherever the poetry of myth is interpreted as biography, history, or science, it is killed. The living images become only remote facts of a distant time or sky. Furthermore, it is never difficult to demonstrate that as science and history mythology is absurd. When a civilization begins to reinterpret its mythology in this way, the life goes out of it, temples become museums, and the link between the two perspectives is dissolved. Such a blight has certainly descended on the Bible and on a great part of the Christian cult.To bring the images back to life, one has to seek, not interesting applications to modern affairs, but illuminating hints from the inspired past. When these are found, vast areas of half-dead iconography disclose again their permanently human meaning.Joseph Campbell / quote ↗
23c. 1945 ADOne finds the same basic mythological themes in all the religions of the world, from the most primitive to the most sophisticated, from the North American plains to European forests to Polynesian atolls. The imagery of myth is a language, a lingua franca that expresses something basic about our deepest humanity. It is variously inflected in its various provinces.Joseph Campbell / quote ↗
24c. 1945 ADIn marriage you are not sacrificing yourself to the other person. You are sacrificing yourself to the relationship.Joseph Campbell / quote ↗
