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
The world without spirit is a wasteland. People have the notion of saving the world by shifting things around, changing the rules, and who's on top, and so forth. No, no! Any world is a valid world if it's alive. The thing to do is to bring life to it, and the only way to do that is to find in your own case where the life is and become alive yourself.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote emphasizes the importance of internal vitality over external changes in the world.
Joseph Campbell highlights that a world devoid of spirit or life is meaningless, regardless of the superficial changes made to its structure. Instead of merely rearranging societal elements or roles, individuals should first seek their own inner life and authenticity, as this personal transformation is essential for truly revitalizing the world around them.
Themes
SpiritLifeChangeAuthenticityVitality
In practice
Example use cases
During a motivational speech at a community event.
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
No further evidence is needed to show that 'mental illness' is not the name of a biological condition whose nature awaits to be elucidated, but is the name of a concept whose purpose is to obscure the obvious.
Thomas SzaszRead
Watch yourself all your life in a mirror and you'll see Death at work like bees in a glass hive.
Jean CocteauRead
Money is the seed of money, and the first guinea is sometimes more difficult to acquire than the second million.
Jean-Jacques RousseauRead
Men might as well be imprisoned, as excluded from the means of earning their bread.
John Stuart MillRead
Religion can emerge in all forms of feeling: here wild anger, there the sweetest pain; here consuming hatred, there the childlike smile of serene humility.
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich SchlegelRead
To begin with, we put the proposition: pure phenomenology is the science of pure consciousness.
Edmund HusserlRead