Quotable Quotes

"Sit in a room and read--and read and read. And read the right books by the right people. Your mind is brought onto that level, and you have a nice, mild, slow-burning rapture all the time."

Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth with Bill Moyers

"Poetry is no more than the flap of a butterfly’s wings, the dart of a hummingbird—a strophe flung into the roar of the mob. Poetry does so little, dares so much. Poetry is the prophet down from the mountain, a gadfly on the body politic, a witness to the desecration; poetry sings our cultural myths, mourns what’s been lost, praises the newborn day."
from "The Citizen's Dilemma in Diverse Times" The Asheville Jung Center on the poetry of Naomi Ruth Lowinsky, Ph.D. in The Poetry of Politics

You miss 100 percent of the shots you never take.
—Wayne Gretzky

Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgement that something else is more important than fear.
—Ambrose Redmoon

Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.
—Oscar Wilde

I’ve gone into hundreds of [fortune-teller's parlors], and have been told thousands of things, but nobody ever told me I was a policewoman getting ready to arrest her.
—New York City detective

If the lessons of history teach us anything it is that nobody learns the lessons that history teaches us.
—Anon

Better to write for yourself and have no public, than to write for the public and have no self.
—Cyril Connolly

"All cultures have grown out of myths. They are founded on myths. What these myths have given has been inspiration for aspiration. The economic interpretation of history is for the birds. Economics is itself a function of aspiration. It's what people aspire to that creates the field in which economics works."

The Collected Lectures of Joseph Campbell, Lecture I.1.1 - The Celebration of Life

"I never met a person who didn't have at least one story waiting to be born." - Catherine Ann Jones (from The NY Times)

"When you are in accord with nature, nature will yield its bounty. This is something that is coming up in our consciousness now, with the ecology movement, recognizing that by violating the environment in which we are living, we are really cutting off the energy and source of our own living."

The Hero's Journey: Joseph Campbell on His Life and Work

"To see life as a poem and yourself participating in that poem is what the myth does for you."

Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth with Bill Moyers

Quote :

"It is my feeling that some stories already exist in the ether, and my job is simply to bring them down to the gross level. The best times are when I seem to disappear altogether and the story writes itself. It passes through me, but is not really mine -- a kind of visitation, if you will. For the mind to be creative, there must be stillness." - J. Krishnamurti

"The eye altering, alters all."
William Blake

In the journey of the soul itself the way out is the way in. It is a movement beyond the known boundaries of faith and convention, the search for what matters, the path of destiny, the route of individuality, the road of original experience, a paradigm for the forging of consciousness itself: in short the hero's journey.

Joseph Campbell; The Hero's Journey

"The Wasteland is the preliminary theme to which the Grail is the answer."

Joseph Campbell; Mythos III: The Shaping of the Western Tradition

"Poetry is not the thing said but a way of saying it. The intellect is not the fount of poetry, may hinder its production, and cannot even be trusted to recognize poetry when it is produced. Art is not, like science, a logic of references but a release from references and rendition of immediate experience: a presentation of forms, images, or ideas in such a way that they will communicate, not primarily a thought or even a feeling, but an impact."

Joseph Campbell; Masks of God: Primitive Mythology

"What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open." - Muriel Rukeyser, "Kathe Kollwitz"

The key to the Grail is compassion,
suffering with, feeling another’s sorrow
as if it were your own.

The one who finds
the dynamo of compassion
is the one who’s found the Grail.

A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living

D. J. (Don) Stephens wrote:

A politician is a fellow who will lay down your life for his country.

Good one!

+The time comes when the pain to remain
a caterpillar is greater than the metamorphosis
it takes to become a butterfly."
AlexSandra L. Lett

[W]hen life produces what the intellect names evil, we may enter into righteous battle, contending from 'loyalty of heart': however, if the principle of love (Christ's 'Love your enemies!') is lost, our humanity too will be lost. 'Man,' in the words of the American novelist Hawthorne, 'must not disclaim his brotherhood even with the guiltiest.'

Myths to LIve By; Joseph Campbell

"The job of the artist is not to document but to conjure, to create a story more true than what is true. What has meaning is an emotional truth, not literal truth."

Anthony Minghella, film director and screenwriter

"The weight of this sad time we must obey.
Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say." -

William Shakespeare, King Lear

“…the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being.”

Carl Jung

Quote :

The image of the cosmos must change with the development of the mind and knowledge; otherwise, the mythic statement is lost, and man becomes dissociated from the very basis of his own religious experience. The Collected Lectures of Joseph Campbell, Lecture I.1.1 - The Celebration of Life

When you are in accord with nature, nature will yield its bounty. This is something that is coming up in our consciousness now, with the ecology movement, recognizing that by violating the environment in which we are living, we are really cutting off the energy and source of our own living.

The Hero's Journey: Joseph Campbell on His Life and Work