No tribal rite has yet been recorded which attempts to keep winter from descending; on the contrary: the rites all prepare the community to endure, together with the rest of nature, the season of the terrible cold.
Joseph CampbellRead
Wherever the poetry of myth is interpreted as biography, history, or science, it is killed.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Myth should be appreciated for its artistic and symbolic value, rather than reduced to mere factual accounts.
Joseph Campbell asserts that when myths, which hold deep poetic and symbolic truths, are strictly interpreted as historical biographies or scientific explanations, their intrinsic meaning is lost. Myths serve a vital role in understanding the human experience, and reducing them to mere facts diminishes their richness and transformative power.
Themes
MythBiographyHistorySciencePoetryInterpretation
In practice
Example use cases
In a lecture about the importance of storytelling, one might quote Campbell to emphasize the value of myths.
More from Joseph Campbell
All quotes →Half the people in the world think that the metaphors of their religious traditions, for example, are facts. And the other half contends that they are not facts at all. As a result we have people who consider themselves believers because they accept metaphors as facts, and we have others who classify themselves as atheists because they think religious metaphors are lies.
Joseph CampbellRead
Christianity isn’t moving people’s lives today. What’s moving people’s lives is the stock market and the baseball scores. What are people excited about? It’s a totally materialistic level that has taken over the world. There isn’t even an ideal that anybody’s fighting for.
Joseph CampbellRead
Apocalypse does not point to a fiery Armageddon but to the fact that our ignorance and our complacency are coming to an end. The exclusivism of there being only one way in which we can be saved, the idea that there is a single religious group that is in sole possession of the truth—that is the world as we know it that must pass away. What is the kingdom? It lies in our realization of the ubiquity of the divine presence in our neighbors, in our enemies, in all of us.
Joseph CampbellRead
The demon that you can swallow gives you it’s power, and the greater life’s pain, the greater life’s reply.
Joseph CampbellRead
And if there was no Fall, what then of the need for Redemption? What god was offended and by whom? Some especially touchy cave bear whose skull had been improperly enshrined?
Joseph CampbellRead
Similar quotes
Bad writing is more than a matter of (expletive deleted) syntax and faulty observation; bad writing usually arises from a stubborn refusal to tell stories about what people actually do to face the fact, let us say, that murderers sometimes help old ladies cross the street.
Stephen KingRead
Writing a novel is an incredibly free experience. One puts one's self in a narrative mode. You can go off in any direction - the past, the future, or go laterally, or include one's own beliefs. It's total freedom.
David MametRead
An incinerator is a writer's best friend.
Thornton WilderRead
Guilt is cancer. Guilt will confine you, torture you, destroy you as an artist. It's a black wall. It's a thief.
Dave GrohlRead
In a photograph a person’s eyes tell much, sometimes they tell all.
Alfred EisenstaedtRead
The landscape thinks itself in me and I am its consciousness.
Paul CezanneRead