Joseph Campbell Quotes

There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical.

No statement about God is simply, literally true. God is far more than can be measured, described, defined in ordinary language, or pinned down to any particular happening.

How pathetic it is to describe these things which can't truly be described.

I love that moment in writing when language falls short. There is something more there. A larger body. Even by the failure of words I begin to detect its dimensions. As I work the prose, shift the verbs, look for new adjectives, a different rhythm, syntax, something new begins to come to the surface.

The best things cannot be told, the second best are misunderstood. After that comes civilized conversation; after that, mass indoctrination; after that, intercultural exchange.

Whatever can't be expressed might as well not exist.

That was when I learned that words are no good; that words dont ever fit even what they are trying to say at. When he was born I knew that motherhood was invented by someone who had to have a word for it because the ones that had the children didn't care whether there was a word for it or not. I knew that fear was invented by someone that had never had the fear; pride, who never had the pride.

There is nothing at all that can be talked about adequately, and the whole art of poetry is to say what can't be said.

When experience flies into realms that language cannot touch, honesty demands beyond-language.

Express only that which cannot be expressed. Leave it unexpressed)

No one's mouth is big enough to utter the whole thing.

Sometimes people mistake the way I talk for what I am thinking.

How strangely do we diminish a thing as soon as we try to express it in words.

Happy is the hearing man; unhappy the speaking man.

Not everything has a name. Some things lead us into a realm beyond words.

In human intercourse the tragedy begins, not when there is misunderstanding about words, but when silence is not understood.

He who does not understand your silence will probably not understand your words.

Words are made for a certain exactness of thought, as tears are for a certain degree of pain. What is least distinct cannot be named; what is clearest is unutterable.

Language is froth on the surface of thought.

After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.

Words are the small change of thought.

I'm a sarcastic person, and people don't get my humor sometimes.

It is not good to talk about Zen, because Zen is nothingness... If you talk about it, you are always lying, and if you don't talk about it, no one knows it is there.

Words are mere shadows cast by ideas. But the ideas they represent are real.

You can't be silent and create silence in being silent. So you have to create silence or, rather, the effect of silence, through words.