Joseph Campbell
American writer, scholar of comparative mythology, and one of the most influential interpreters of the world's spiritual traditions in the twentieth century. Born in 1904 in White Plains, New York, he taught literature at Sarah Lawrence College for nearly four decades and produced a body of work — most famously The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949) and the four-volume Masks of God (1959-1968) — that mapped the deep structural unity beneath the world's mythologies. His PBS conversation series with Bill Moyers, The Power of Myth (1988), introduced his work to millions and made phrases like 'follow your bliss' and 'the hero's journey' part of common cultural vocabulary. George Lucas's Star Wars, in Lucas's own telling, was structured directly on Campbell's monomyth. He died in 1987 in Honolulu.
quotes in library
Quotes by Joseph Campbell
105 quotes“We must let go of the life we have planned, so as to accept the one that is waiting for us.”
“The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are.”
“If the path before you is clear, you're probably on someone else's.”
“Find a place inside where there's joy, and the joy will burn out the pain.”
“We're not on our journey to save the world but to save ourselves. But in doing that you save the world.”
“The big question is whether you are going to be able to say a hearty yes to your adventure.”
“If you do follow your bliss you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living.”
“Myths are public dreams. Dreams are private myths.”
“It is by going down into the abyss that we recover the treasures of life.”
“All the gods, all the heavens, all the worlds, are within us.”
“Myth is much more important and true than history. History is just journalism, and you know how reliable that is.”
“The hero's journey always begins with the call.”
“The first step in answering the call is to leave the familiar behind.”
“What you have to do, you do with play.”
“All life is suffering. The first noble truth. To learn to participate in joyful sorrow.”
“The goal of life is to make your heartbeat match the beat of the universe.”
“We're capable of being awakened, and so we must work toward awakening.”
“The mythological hero, setting forth from his commonday hut or castle, is lured, carried away, or else voluntarily proceeds, to the threshold of adventure.”
“The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.”
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