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“You become mature when you become the authority of your own life.”
“As a society, we are dying for lack of myth.”
“The warrior's approach is to say 'yes' to life: 'yea' to it all.”
“The dragon to be slain is the dragon of your own ego, the dragon of holding to old forms.”
“All you have to do is to know and trust, and the ageless guardians will appear.”
“Where you stumble, there your treasure is.”
“Marriage is the symbol of two becoming one. The greatest of all symbols.”
“What we are looking for is the experience of being alive.”
“Everything that exists owes its existence to opposites.”
“We're so engaged in doing things to achieve purposes of outer value that we forget the inner value, the rapture associated with being alive, is what it is all about.”
“In every act of creation there is a death, and in every death a new creation.”
“The artist is a hero of consciousness.”
“Myth is the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human cultural manifestation.”
“The function of mythology is to put us in contact with the deepest source of our being.”
“To live is to deal with destruction. To love is to deal with grief. To create is to deal with chaos.”
“The journey of the hero begins with the discovery that there is something to be sought.”
“You are the hero of your own myth.”
“There's no security in life, only opportunity.”
“The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.”
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