Joseph Campbell Quotes

Our task must be to free ourselves by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature and its beauty.

God is each truly and exalted thing, therefore the individual himself to the highest degree. But are not nature and the world individuals?

We cannot command Nature except by obeying her.

We should be evolving into a new age of business with a worldview that maintains one simple proposition - that all of nature: humans, animals, earth, are interconnected and interdependent.

.... we are a part of nature as a whole, whose order we follow.

To be whole and harmonious, man must also know the music of the beaches and the woods. He must find the thing of which he is only an infinitesimal part and nurture it and love it, if he is to live.

Nature! We are enveloped and embraced by her, incapable of emerging from her and incapable of entering her more deeply. Unbidden and unwarned, she receives us into the circuits of her dance, drifting onward with us herself, until we grow tired and drop from her arms.

For real company and friendship, there is nothing outside the animal kingdom that is comparable to a river.

Nature is none other than God in things. Animals and plants are living effects of Nature; whence all of God is in all things. Think thus, of the sun in the crocus, in the narcissus, in the heliotrope, in the rooster, in the lion.

When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe. One fancies a heart like our own must be beating in every crystal and cell, and we feel like stopping to speak to the plants and animals as friendly fellow-mountaineers. Nature as a poet, an enthusiastic workingman, becomes more and more visible the farther and higher we go.

We have today to learn to get back into accord with the wisdom of nature and realize again our brotherhood with the animals and with the water and the sea.

For a long time we have thought we were better than the living world, and now some of us tend to think we are worse, that everything we touch turns to soot. But neither perspective is healthy. We have to remember how it feels to have equal standing in the world, to be "between the mountain and the ant . . . part and parcel of creations," as the Iroquois traditionalist Oren Lyons says.

The river, for example, is the living symbol of all the life it sustains or nourishes - fish, aquatic insects, water ouzels, otter, fisher, deer, elk, bear, and all other animals, including man, who are dependent on it or who enjoy it for its sight, its sound, or its life. The river as plaintiff speaks for the ecological unit of life that is part of it.

This is a green world, with animals comparatively few and small, and all dependent upon the leaves. By leaves we live.

The equation of animal and vegetable life is too complicated a problem for human intelligence to solve, and we can never know how wide a circle of disturbance we produce in the harmonies of nature when we throw the smallest pebble into the ocean of organic life.

Such a man has some right to fish, and I love to see nature carried out in him.

We are animal. We are Earth. We are water. We are a community of human beings living on this planet together. And we forget that. We become disconnected, we lose our center point of gravity, that stillness that allows us to listen to life on a deeper level and to meet each other in a fully authentic and present way.

A man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a king, and eat of the fish that hath fed of that worm

Yes, I am going into the woods; I am going into the unity of all things.

We cannot learn freedom and responsibility within the confines of our own species. We cannot understand life and death and what they are for in exclusively human terms. Without that which is wild, the world becomes a cell block.

The sun is a thief: she lures the sea and robs it. The moon is a thief: he steals his silvery light from the sun. The sea is a thief: it dissolves the moon.

The brown paper bag is the only thing civilized man has produced that does not seem out of place in nature.

Our religion keeps reminding us that we aren't just will and thoughts. We're also sand and wind and thunder. Rain. The seasons. All those things. You learn to respect everything because you are everything. If you respect yourself, you respect all things.

He who regards all things as one is a companion of Nature.

Nature will not be conquered, but gives herself freely to her true lover - to him who revels with her, bathes in her seas, sails her rivers, camps in her woods, and with no mercenary ends, accepts all.