Joseph Campbell Quotes

Statues and pictures and verse may be grand, But they are not the Life for which they stand.

You may name a bronze statue 'Liberty,' or a painted figure in a city hall 'Commerce,' or a marble form in a temple 'Athene' or 'Venus;' but what is really there is only a representation of a single woman.

There's a lot of places where the image of a cube as a thing of power is pertinent. I don't know why that is. I don't have any mythic explanation for it, but it seems to work for people.

I'm drawn to silhouettes because of their emblematic rather than their illustrational quality. I see them as shapes, allowing an image to become an abstraction and for pure painting to take place.

Images are not quite ideas, they are stiller than that, with less implication outside themselves. And they are not myth, they do not have the explanatory power; they are nearer to pure story. Nor are they always metaphors; they do not say this is that, they say this is.

The modern work of art, as I have said, is a symbol.

Once an object has been incorporated in a picture it accepts a new destiny.

There is no society ever discovered in the remotest corner of the world that has not had something that we would consider the arts. Visual arts - decoration of surfaces and bodies - appears to be a human universal.

We want people to experience art and think about it. The art reflects our time, it is about our culture.

What you look for in a picture is a metaphor, something that means something more, that makes you think about things you've seen or thought about.

A sign to me is a one-liner, a symbol is very complex and my house is a series of symbols.

When a man understands the art of seeing, he can trace the spirit of an age and the features of a king even in the knocker on a door.

Well, I think, you know, the arts are really what - one of the things that make this country strong. We always think it's our economy or our military power, but in fact, I think it's our culture, our civilization, our ideas, our creativity.

How do you show what's not there? How do you show energy?

I'm not a religious person. The language of photography is symbolic.

Art is the concrete representation of our most subtle feelings.

I've managed to dodge the curse. Not all my family have. Of course, music helped me - music is all about civilization, about something worthwhile. It's all about ideas.

What I love most about icons is finding out what's behind them, exploring the price of their power.

All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex and vital.

If you want to understand a nation, look at its dancers and listen to its folk songs—don't pay any attention to its politicians.

The statues are no big issue. They are only objects made of mud or stone.

Art is the permanence of a civilization.

Let me make the songs of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws.

For better or worse, we are the Court of Appeals for the Hollywood Circuit. Millions of people toil in the shadow of the law we make, and much of their livelihood is made possible by the existence of intellectual property rights. But much of their livelihood - and much of the vibrancy of our culture - also depends on the existence of other intangible rights: The right to draw ideas from a rich and varied public domain, and the right to mock, for profit as well as fun, the cultural icons of our time.

One of the questions that has most bothered me in my reflections on culture is the question of kitsch. Just what is it? When did it begin? And why?