Some Campbell Quotations

A Few Quotations of Joseph Campbell

Campbell often would use a given line in different lectures and interviews, often using it to illustrate different ideas. Here are few that we have been asked about, with their sources.


On Following Your Bliss

"I even have a superstition that has has grown on me as the result of invisible hands coming all the time -- namely, that 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. When you can see that, you begin to meet people who are in the field of your bliss, and they open the doors to you. I say, follow your bliss and don't be afraid, and doors will open where you didn't know they were going they to be." -- The Power of Myth (New York: Doubleday, 1988), p. 120.

"When you follow your bliss, and by bliss I mean the deep sense of being in it and doing what the push is out of your own existence -- it may not be fun, but it's your bliss and there's bliss behind pain too. You follow that, and doors will open where there were no doors before, where you would not have thought there were going to be doors, and where there wouldn't be a door for anybody else." -- The Hero's Journey,(San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1990) p. 214.

"The poor chap who gets himself in a job and goes down that groove all his life ... A friend gave me a list of things that let you know when you are old. Some of them are silly, others are serious ... The really serious one is 'when you've gotten to the top of the ladder and you find it's against the wrong wall.' And that's where so many people are. It's dreadful." -- A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living, selected and edited by Dianne K. Osbon (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), p. 68.

"The saying a friend of mine has given me for letting me know when you are in late middle age is: You've got to the top of the ladder and found it's against the wrong wall. Well, I think I found what it is you need to break through that wall. This is one of the delights of my experience." -- The Hero's Journey: Joseph Campbell on his Life and Work (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1990), p. 124.

"And you meet those people later on, and they are the ones who have climbed to the top of the ladder and found it's against the wrong wall. They have not lived their lives." -- The Hero's Journey , p. 63.

"But if a person has had the sense of the Call -- the feeling that there's an adventure for him -- and if he doesn't follow that, but remains in the society because it's safe and secure, then life dries up. And then he comes to that condition in late middle age: he's gotten to the top of the ladder, and found that it's against the wrong wall." -- An Open Life: Joseph Campbell in Conversation with Michael Toms (New York: Harper & Row, 1990), p. 24.

"A bit of advice given to a young Native American at the time of his initiation:
'As you go the way of life, you will see a great chasm.
Jump.
It is not as wide as you think.'" -- A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living, selected and edited by Dianne K. Osbon (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), p. 298.

On Mythology

"No, mythology 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 the that bounding rim of the Buddhist Wheel of Becoming. Mythology pitches the mind beyond that rim, to what can be known but not told. So this is the penultimate truth." -- The Power of Myth (New York: Doubleday, 1988), p. 163.

"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." -- The Hero with a Thousand Faces (2nd ed., Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), p. 3.

"Heinrich Zimmer once said, 'The best things can't be told; the second best are misunderstood; the third best have to do with history.' Now the vocabulary through which the best things are told as second best is the vocabulary of history, but it doesn't refer to history; it refers through this to the transcendent." -- An Open Life: Joseph Campbell in Conversation with Michael Toms (New York: Harper & Row, 1990), p. 70.

On the Future of Myth

"You can't predict what a myth is going to be any more than you can predict what you're going to dream tonight. Myths and dreams come from the same place. They come from realizations of some kind that have then to find expression in symbolic form. And the only myth that is going to be worth thinking about in the immediate future is one that is talking about the planet, not the city, not these people, but the planet, and everybody on it. That's my main thought for what the future myth is going to be.
"And what it will have to deal with will be exactly what all myths have dealt with - the maturation of the individual, from dependency through adulthood, through maturity, and then to the exit; and then how to relate to this society and how to relate this society to the world of nature and the cosmos. That's what the myths have all talked about, and what this one's got to talk about." --The Power of Myth: with Bill Moyers (New York: Doubleday, 1988), p. 32.