QUOTES by Joseph Campbell
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“We must be willing to let go of the life we’ve planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.”
Quote by -Joseph Campbell
Their task [creative artists], therefore, is to communicate directly from one inward world to another, in such a way that an actual shock of experience will have been rendered: not a mere statement for the information or persuasion of a brain, but an effective communication across the void of space and time from one center of consciousness to another.
Quote by -Joseph Campbell
A real artist is the one who has learned to recognize and to render... the 'radiance' of all things as an epiphany or showing forth of the truth.
Quote by -Joseph Campbell
If you go to a master to study and learn the techniques, you diligently follow all the instructions the master puts upon you. But then comes the time for using the rules in your own way and not being bound by them....You can actually forget the rules because they have been assimilated. You are an artist. Your own innocence now is of one who has become an artist, who has been, as it were, transmuted.... You can't have creativity unless you leave behind the bounded, the fixed, all the rules.
Quote by -Joseph Campbell
What the artist must render is a living moment somehow, a living moment actually in action or an inward experience.
Quote by -Joseph Campbell
The role of the artist I now understood as that of revealing through the world-surfaces the implicit forms of the soul, and the great agent to assist the artist was the myth.
Quote by -Joseph Campbell
Both the artist and the lover know that perfection is not loveable. It is the clumsiness of a fault that makes a person lovable.
Quote by -Joseph Campbell
This is all I ever wanted - to help students and artists see myth as a reflection of the one sublime adventure of life, and then to breathe new life into it.
Quote by -Joseph Campbell
You must have a place to which you can go in your heart, your mind, or your house, almost every day, where you do not owe anyone and where no one owes you - a place that simply allows for the blossoming of something new and promising.
Quote by -Joseph Campbell
What's made up in the head is the fiction. What comes out of the heart is a myth.
Quote by -Joseph Campbell
For when the heart insists on its destiny, resisting the general blandishment, then the agony is great; so too the danger. Forces, however, will have been set in motion beyond the reckoning of the senses. Sequences of events from the corners of the world will draw gradually together, and miracles of coincidence bring the inevitable to pass.
Quote by -Joseph Campbell
The Greeks, it will be recalled, regarded Eros, the god of love, as the eldest of the gods; but also as the youngest, born fresh and dewy-eyed in every living heart.
Quote by -Joseph Campbell
I think what we lack isn't science, but poetry that reveals what the heart is ready to recognize
Quote by -Joseph Campbell
If a person does not listen to the demands of their own spiritual and heart life and insists on a certain program, you're going to have a schizophrenic crackup. The person has put themselves off center. They have aligned themselves with a programmatic life and it's not the one the body is interested in at all.
Quote by -Joseph Campbell
We are all born as animals and live the life that animals live: we sleep, eat, reproduce, and fight. There is, however, another order of living, which the animals do not know, that of awe before the mystery of being ... that can be the root and branch of the spiritual sense of one’s days. That is the birth - the Virgin Birth - in the heart of a properly human, spiritual life.
Quote by -Joseph Campbell
One cannot predict the next mythology any more than one can predict tonight's dream; for a mythology is not an ideology. It is not something projected from the brain, but something experienced from the heart, from recognition of identities behind or within the appearances of nature, perceiving with love a 'thou' where there would otherwise have been only an 'it.'
Quote by -Joseph Campbell
Modern romance, like Greek tragedy, celebrates the mystery of dismemberment, which is life in time. The happy ending is justly scorned as a misrepresentation; for the world, as we know it, as we have seen it, yields but one ending: death, disintegration, dismemberment, and the crucifixion of our heart with the passing of the forms that we have loved.
Quote by -Joseph Campbell
I had my heart set on three things: One, the choral office; two, the habit; and community life. We spend a lot of time together. We work together, eat together, pray together,
Quote by -Joseph Campbell
The real important function of the church is to present the symbol, to perform the rite, to let you behold this divine message in such a way that you are capable of experiencing it. What the relationship of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost to each other might be, in technical terms, is not half important as you, the celebrant, feeling the Virgin Birth within you, the birth of the mystic, mythic being that is your own spiritual life.
Quote by -Joseph Campbell
This is an important point about symbols: they do not refer to historical events; they refer through historical events to spiritual or psychological principles and powers that are of yesterday, today, and tomorrow, and that are everywhere.
Quote by -Joseph Campbell
When you translate the Bible with excessive literalism, you demythologize it. The possibility of a convincing reference to the individual's own spiritual experience is lost. (111)
Quote by -Joseph Campbell
If a person does not listen to the demands of their own spiritual and heart life and insists on a certain program, you're going to have a schizophrenic crackup. The person has put themselves off center. They have aligned themselves with a programmatic life and it's not the one the body is interested in at all.
Quote by -Joseph Campbell
We are all born as animals and live the life that animals live: we sleep, eat, reproduce, and fight. There is, however, another order of living, which the animals do not know, that of awe before the mystery of being ... that can be the root and branch of the spiritual sense of one’s days. That is the birth - the Virgin Birth - in the heart of a properly human, spiritual life.
Quote by -Joseph Campbell
It takes courage to do what you want. Other people have a lot of plans for you... Follow your bliss.
Quote by -Joseph Campbell
The psychological dangers through which earlier generations were guided by the symbols and spiritual exercises of their mythological and religious inheritance, we today (in so far as we are unbelievers, or, if believers, in so far as our inherited beliefs fail to represent the real problems of contemporary life) must face alone, or, at best with only tentative, impromptu, and not often very effective guidance. This is our problem as modern, "enlightened" individuals, for whom all gods and devils have been rationalized out of existence.
Quote by -Joseph Campbell
When we talk about settling the world's problems, we're barking up the wrong tree. The world is perfect. It's a mess. It has always been a mess. We're not going to change it. Our job is to straighten out our own lives.
Quote by -Joseph Campbell
The images of Myth are reflections of Spiritual and Depth potentialities of every one of us. Through contemplating those we evoke those powers in our own lives to operate through ourselves.
Quote by -Joseph Campbell
The goal of life is to make your heartbeat match the beat of the universe, to match your nature with Nature.
Quote by -Joseph Campbell
When people get married because they think it's a long-time love affair, they'll be divorced very soon, because all love affairs end in disappointment. But marriage is a recognition of a spiritual identity.
Quote by -Joseph Campbell
In one of the Upanishads it says, when the glow of a sunset holds you and you say 'Aha,' that is the recognition of the divinity. And when you say 'Aha' to an art object, that is a recognition of divinity. And what divinity is it? It is your divinity, which is the only divinity there is. We are all phenomenal manifestations of a divine will to live, and that will and the consciousness of life is one in all of us, and that is what artwork expresses.
Quote by -Joseph Campbell
It [music] has an awakening function. Life is a rhythm. Art is an organization of rhythms. Music is a fundamental art that touches our will system. In Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Idea he speaks of music as the sound that awakens the will. The rhythm of the music awakens certain life rhythms, ways of living and experiencing life. So it's an awakener of life.
Quote by -Joseph Campbell
The creative act is not hanging on, but yielding to a new creative movement. Awe is what moves us forward.
Quote by -Joseph Campbell
I think of mythology as the homeland of the muses, the inspirers of art, the inspirers of poetry. To see life as a poem and yourself participating in a poem is what the myth does for you.
Quote by -Joseph Campbell
Shakespeare said that art is a mirror held up to nature. And that’s what it is. The nature is your nature, and all of these wonderful poetic images of mythology are referring to something in you. When your mind is trapped by the image out there so that you never make the reference to yourself, you have misread the image.
Quote by -Joseph Campbell
Oh my God, does art engender humanity? It awakens your humanity. But humanity has nothing to do with political theory. Political theory is in the interests of one group of humanity, or one ideal for humanity. But humanity-my heavens, that's what proper art renders. We have a paradox. Going into the deepest aspects of inner space connects you with something that is the most vital for the outer realm.
Quote by -Joseph Campbell
It would not be too much to say that myth is the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human cultural manifestation. Religions, philosophies, arts, the social forms of primitive and historic man, prime discoveries in science and technology, the very dreams that blister sleep, boil up from the basic, magic ring of myth.
Quote by -Joseph Campbell
The importance of the End of time is as ... a psychological event ... When you have seen the radiance of eternity through all the forms of time ... and it is the function of art to make that visible to you ... then you have really have ended life in the world as it is lived by those who only think only in the historical, concretizing terms. This is the function of mythology.
Quote by -Joseph Campbell
The function of the artist is the mythologization of the culture and the world. In the visual arts there were two men whose work handled mythological themes in a marvelous way: Paul Klee and Pablo Picasso.
Quote by -Joseph Campbell
This death to the logic of emotional commitments of our chance moment in the world of space and time, this recognition of, the shift of our emphasis to, the universal life that throbs and celebrates its victory in the very kiss of our own annihilation, this amor fati, 'love of fate,' love of the fate that is inevitably death, constitutes the experience of the tragic art...
Quote by -Joseph Campbell