Joseph Campbell Quotes About Mythology

Quotes about: Mythology

• Eternity is not future or past. Eternity is a dimension of now.

  Joseph Campbell

  Future, Past, Dimensions

  Joseph Campbell (2009). “Pathways to Bliss: Mythology and Personal Transformation: Easyread Large Edition”, p.28, ReadHowYouWant.com

• 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.

  Joseph Campbell

  Art, Thinking, Doe

  Joseph Campbell, Bill Moyers (2011). “The Power of Myth”, p.65, Anchor

• I think of mythology as a function of biology; the energies of the body are the energies that move the imagination. These energies are the source, then, of mythological imagery; in a mythological organization of symbols, the conflicts between the different organic impulses within the body are resolved and harmonized. You might say mythology is a formula for the harmonization of the energies of life.

  Joseph Campbell

  Moving, Thinking, Organization

• There are mythologies that are scattered, broken up, all around us. We stand on what I call a terminal moraine of shattered mythic systems that once structured society. They can be detected all around us. You can select any of these fragments that activate your imagination for your own use. Let it help shape your own relationship to the unconscious system out of which these symbols have come.

  Joseph Campbell

  Relationship, Broken, Imagination

  "Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor".

• The wonder is that the characteristic efficacy to touch and inspire deep creative centers dwells in the smallest nursery fairy tale-as the flavor of the ocean is contained in a droplet or the whole mystery of life within the egg of a flea. For the symbols of mythology are not manufactured; they cannot be ordered, invented, or permanently suppressed. They are spontaneous productions of the psyche, and each bears within it, undamaged, the germ power of its source.

  Joseph Campbell

  Ocean, Eggs, Creative

  Joseph Campbell (2008). “The Hero with a Thousand Faces”, p.1, New World Library

• Myth is much more important and true than history. History is just journalism and you know how reliable that is.

  Joseph Campbell

  Inspirational, Truth, Important

• 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.

  Joseph Campbell

  Nature, Art, Mirrors

  Joseph Campbell, Bill Moyers (2011). “The Power of Myth”, p.68, Anchor

• If you live with the myths in your mind, you will find yourself always in mythological situations. They cover everything that can happen to you. And that enables you to interpret the myth in relation to life, as well as life in relation to myth.

  Joseph Campbell

  Life, Finding Yourself, Mind

• Every religion is true one way or another. It is true when understood metaphorically. But when it gets stuck in its own metaphors, interpreting them as facts, then you are in trouble.

  Joseph Campbell

  Inspirational, True Friend, Mind Your Own Business

  Joseph Campbell, Bill Moyers (2011). “The Power of Myth”, p.67, Anchor

• Myths are public dreams, dreams are private myths.

  Joseph Campbell

  Inspirational, Dream, Business

• If you want to change the world, you have to change the metaphor.

  Joseph Campbell

  Inspirational, World, Want

• The rise and fall of civilizations in the long, broad course of history can be seen to have been largely a function of the integrity and cogency of their supporting canons of myth; for not authority but aspiration is the motivator, builder, and transformer of civilization.

  Joseph Campbell

  Inspirational, Integrity, Fall

• Mythology helps you to identify the mysteries of the energies pouring through you. Therein lies your eternity.

  Joseph Campbell

  Lying, Energy, Pouring

• 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.

  Joseph Campbell

  Art, Thinking, Historical

• Mythology tells us that where you stumble, there your treasure is ... The world is a match for us, and we’re a match for the world. And where it seems most challenging lies the greatest invitation to find deeper and greater power in ourselves.

  Joseph Campbell

  Lying, Challenges, World

• The two greatest works of war mythology in the west ... are the Iliad and the Old Testament... When we turn from the Iliad and Athens to Jerusalem and the Old Testament we find a single-minded single deity with his sympathies forever on one side. And the enemy, accordingly, no matter who it may be, is handled... pretty much as though he were subhuman: not a "Thou" but an "It."

  Joseph Campbell

  War, Two, Forever

• 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 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

  Buddhist, Lying, Mind

  Joseph Campbell, Bill Moyers (2011). “The Power of Myth”, p.206, Anchor

• When your mind is simply trapped by the image out there so that you never make the reference to yourself, you have misread the image.

  Joseph Campbell

  Understanding, Mind, Mythology

  Joseph Campbell, Bill Moyers (2011). “The Power of Myth”, p.68, Anchor

• When you look at that nature world it becomes an icon, it becomes a holy picture that speaks of the origins of the world. Almost every mythology sees the origins of life coming out of water. And, curiously, that's true. It's amusing that the origin of life out of water is in myths and then again, finally, in science, we find the same thing. It's exactly so.

  Joseph Campbell

  Rain, Origin Of Life, Icons

  Joseph Campbell, Phil Cousineau, Stuart L. Brown (1990). “The Hero's Journey: Joseph Campbell on His Life and Work”, p.10, New World Library

• Mythology is the womb of mankind's initiation to life and death.

  Joseph Campbell

  Life, Death, Men

  "Bios and Mythos".

• Essentially, mythologies are enormous poems that are renditions of insights, giving some sense of the marvel, the miracle and wonder of life.

  Joseph Campbell

  Life, Giving, Miracle

• 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.

  Joseph Campbell

  Inspirational, Air, Together

  Joseph Campbell (2011). “Myths to Live By”, p.146, Joseph Campbell Foundation

• Mythology may, in a real sense, be defined as other people's religion. And religion may, in a sense, be understood as popular misunderstanding of mythology. (8)

  Joseph Campbell

  Inspirational, Real, People

  Joseph Campbell (2001). “Thou Art that: Transforming Religious Metaphor”, p.8, New World Library

• Clearly, mythology is no toy for children. Nor is it a matter of archaic, merely scholarly concern, of no moment to modern men of action. For its symbols (whether in the tangible form of images or in the abstract form of ideas) touch and release the deepest centers of motivation, moving literate and illiterate alike, moving mobs, moving civilizations.

  Joseph Campbell

  Inspirational, Children, Motivation

  Joseph Campbell (1976). “The Masks of God: Primitive mythology”

• Mythology is composed by poets out of their insights and realizations. Mythologies are not invented; they are found. You can no more tell us what your dream is going to be tonight than we can invent a myth. Myths come from the mystical region of essential experience.

  Joseph Campbell

  Dream, Found You, Essentials

  Joseph Campbell, David Kudler (2003). “Myths of Light: Eastern Metaphors of the Eternal”, p.19, New World Library

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