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Joseph Campbell Quotes about Art

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It is the function of art to carry us beyond speech to experience.

It is the function of art to carry us beyond speech to experience.

Joseph Campbell
Art, Speech, Function

Art is the set of wings to carry you out of your own entanglement.

Joseph Campbell
Art, Wings, Entanglement

In one of the Upanishads it says, when the glow of a sunset holds you and you say 'Aha,' that is the recognition of the divinity. And when you say 'Aha' to an art object, that is a recognition of divinity. And what divinity is it? It is your divinity, which is the only divinity there is. We are all phenomenal manifestations of a divine will to live, and that will and the consciousness of life is one in all of us, and that is what artwork expresses.

Joseph Campbell
Art, Sunset, Divinity

The goal of life is rapture. Art is the way we experience it.

Joseph Campbell
Art, Goal, Way

I think of mythology as the homeland of the muses, the inspirers of art, the inspirers of poetry. To see life as a poem and yourself participating in a poem is what the myth does for you.

Joseph Campbell
Art, Thinking, Doe
Joseph Campbell, Bill Moyers (2011). “The Power of Myth”, p.65, Anchor

It [music] has an awakening function. Life is a rhythm. Art is an organization of rhythms. Music is a fundamental art that touches our will system. In Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Idea he speaks of music as the sound that awakens the will. The rhythm of the music awakens certain life rhythms, ways of living and experiencing life. So it's an awakener of life.

Joseph Campbell
Inspirational, Art, Organization

Art is the clothing of a revelation

Joseph Campbell
Art, Revelations, Art Is

Myth must be kept alive. The people who can keep it alive are the artists of one kind or another.

Joseph Campbell
Inspirational, Art, People
Joseph Campbell, Bill Moyers (2011). “The Power of Myth”, p.107, Anchor

Just as anyone who listens to the muse will hear, you can write out of your own intention or out of inspiration. There is such a thing. It comes up and talks. And those who have heard deeply the rhythms and hymns of the gods, can recite those hymns in such a way that the gods will be attracted.

Joseph Campbell
Inspirational, Art, Writing
Joseph Campbell, Phil Cousineau, Stuart L. Brown (1990). “The Hero's Journey: Joseph Campbell on His Life and Work”, p.124, New World Library

The creative act is not hanging on, but yielding to a new creative movement. Awe is what moves us forward.

Joseph Campbell
Art, Moving, Creative

Behind all these manifestations is the one radiance, which shines through all things. The function of art is to reveal this radiance through the created object.

Joseph Campbell
Art, Shining, Radiance
Joseph Campbell, Bill Moyers (2011). “The Power of Myth”, p.134, Anchor

Shakespeare said that art is a mirror held up to nature. And that’s what it is. The nature is your nature, and all of these wonderful poetic images of mythology are referring to something in you. When your mind is trapped by the image out there so that you never make the reference to yourself, you have misread the image.

Joseph Campbell
Nature, Art, Mirrors
Joseph Campbell, Bill Moyers (2011). “The Power of Myth”, p.68, Anchor

Oh my God, does art engender humanity? It awakens your humanity. But humanity has nothing to do with political theory. Political theory is in the interests of one group of humanity, or one ideal for humanity. But humanity-my heavens, that's what proper art renders. We have a paradox. Going into the deepest aspects of inner space connects you with something that is the most vital for the outer realm.

Joseph Campbell
Art, Space, Political

It would not be too much to say that myth is the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human cultural manifestation. Religions, philosophies, arts, the social forms of primitive and historic man, prime discoveries in science and technology, the very dreams that blister sleep, boil up from the basic, magic ring of myth.

Joseph Campbell
Dream, Art, Philosophy
Joseph Campbell (2008). “The Hero with a Thousand Faces”, p.1, New World Library

The function of the artist is the mythologization of the culture and the world. In the visual arts there were two men whose work handled mythological themes in a marvelous way: Paul Klee and Pablo Picasso.

Joseph Campbell
Art, Men, Two

This death to the logic of emotional commitments of our chance moment in the world of space and time, this recognition of, the shift of our emphasis to, the universal life that throbs and celebrates its victory in the very kiss of our own annihilation, this amor fati, 'love of fate,' love of the fate that is inevitably death, constitutes the experience of the tragic art.

Joseph Campbell
Art, Commitment, Fate
Joseph Campbell (2008). “The Hero with a Thousand Faces”, p.20, New World Library

Myths are so intimately bound to culture, time, and place that unless the symbols, the metaphors, are kept alive by constant recreation through the arts, the life just slips away from them.

Joseph Campbell
Art, Culture, Alive
Joseph Campbell, Bill Moyers (2011). “The Power of Myth”, p.72, Anchor

The importance of the End of time is as ... a psychological event ... When you have seen the radiance of eternity through all the forms of time ... and it is the function of art to make that visible to you ... then you have really have ended life in the world as it is lived by those who only think only in the historical, concretizing terms. This is the function of mythology.

Joseph Campbell
Art, Thinking, Historical

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