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1) “Love is a friendship set to music.”
The author of this quote is E. Joseph Cossman (a successful door-to-door and mail order salesman who pioneered the infomercial and is best known for marketing “spud guns,” shrunken heads, and the ant farm.).
Easy to see how this happened. Back in the 1990s, a list of inspirational quotes was forwarded and re-forwarded countless times via email, with quotes organized in alphabetical order according to the name of the author. Someone who loved this quote by E. Joseph Cossman misread the list and assumed it was said by the author of the quote immediately above it – our own Joseph Campbell. That unknown individual apparently shared it on a bulletin board or webpage, where it was seen and copied and re-pasted so often over the last two decades that it has gone viral (aided by the fact that Campbell is far better known than Cossman, and hence more memorable in the public consciousness).
Even though we have posted countless corrections, anyone doing a cursory search will still find this saying attributed to Campbell. Though I’m sure Joe would heartily approve of this definition of love, he would never accept credit for another man’s work.
2) “The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure that you seek.”
This at least has some connection to Joe – it’s a paraphrase of the following passage from A Joseph Campbell Companion:
The very cave you are afraid to enter turns out to be the source of what you are looking for. The damned thing in the cave that was so dreaded has become the center.”
David Kudler (Managing Editor of the Collected Works of Joseph Campbell), Michael Lambert (who handles Rights and Permissions for JCF), and I have conducted multiple exhaustive searches through Campbell’s work over the years, published and unpublished, for ”The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure that you seek,” to no avail, which is too bad as it’s an elegant and succinct re-statement of a key Campbellian concept).
Much of my work with the Joseph Campbell Foundation (JCF) over the years has involved following up on quotes attributed to Campbell. Given our collective familiarity with Campbell’s corpus, most we’re able to find with relative ease – but then there are quotes that sound like Campbell which may or may not be him: tracking the source of those is no easy task (given intellectual property laws, those who would cite him in their work need permission from JCF, which is Joe’s designated literary heir – but we can’t give permission for things he didn’t say).
Over time we’ll add more faux Joseph Campbell quotes to this thread.
But if you’re looking for things Joseph Campbell really did say, visit our database of known Campbell quotes. So far we have compiled 436 properly sourced sayings (many are from books, essays, and audio or video lectures, and several are from interviews). Every month we’ll keep expanding this database.
And if you can’t find it there, feel free to ask it here in the Joseph Campbell Quotes forum (though please be patient and bear with us: sometimes this quest is less hero’s journey and more needle-in-a-haystack).
Stephen Gerringer
tie-dyed teller of tales
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Thanks for this bringing up this important issue to be aware of; Stephen.
I have used the above quote about the “Cave” on numerous occasions because of the reference in Diane Osbon’s book: “Reflections on the Art of Living: A Joseph Campbell Companion”; and had no idea it was not Joseph’s; and indeed after reading through the foundation homepage listings as you linked to above; all of these numerous quotes you mentioned were well worth any time spent with them. Yes; that would be quite helpful if anyone finds anything like this to bring it to your attention! Thank you for posting this.
I may have misunderstood your post, but Joseph Campbell did say the following, taken from A Joseph Campbell Companion:
The very cave you are afraid to enter turns out to be the source of what you are looking for. The damned thing in the cave that was so dreaded has become the center.”
Feel free to quote that and attribute it to Joe. However, “The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure that you seek,” on the other hand, does not appear anywhere in Diane Osbon’s A Joseph Campbell Companion, or any other work of Campbell’s. Our best guess is that some well-meaning soul either paraphrased or misremembered that passage from the Companion, and passed it off as Campbell’s own words.
Ironically, this is one of those rare instances when the faux quote is an improvement on what Campbell actually said – it’s short, succinct, with a better rhythm, and easier to remember.
Stephen Gerringer
tie-dyed teller of talesMuch relieved to hear that Stephen; because it happens to be one of my favorite quotes of his and have used it often; but unfortunately a lot of the time in it’s abbreviated form you just mentioned! Glad you posted this thread so to have a place to inform everyone about these things.
3. “When you follow your bliss, the universe will open door where there were only walls.”
To the best of our knowledge, though Joseph Campbell would certainly agree with this point, he didn’t say exactly this anywhere that we can find. This specific statement comes from Rebecca Armstrong, who had known Campbell, a good friend of her parents, from her childhood on; Rebecca may well have been paraphrasing, rather than using a direct quote.
Rebecca is accurately conveying Campbell’s sense of the phrase; JCF just can’t guarantee it’s an exact quote. Better to use one of the many other verified versions:
“If you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living.”
Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth, with Bill Moyers
“Follow your bliss and don’t be afraid, and doors will open where you didn’t know they were going to be.”
Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth, with Bill Moyers
“But each incarnation, you might say, has a potentiality, and the mission of life is to live that potentiality. How do you do it? My answer is, “Follow your bliss.” There’s something inside you that knows when you’re in the center, that knows when you’re on the beam or off the beam. And if you get off the beam to earn money, you’ve lost your life. And if you stay in the center and don’t get any money, you still have your bliss.”
Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth, with Bill Moyers
“How do you find the divine power in yourself? The word enthusiasm means ‘filled with a god.’ So what makes you enthusiastic? Follow it.
That’s been my advice to young people who ask me, ‘What shall I do?’ I taught once in a boys’ prep school. That’s the moment for young boys (or it used to be; I don’t know what’s going on now) when they had to decide their life courses. You know, where are they going? And they’re caught with excitement. This one wants to study art, this one poetry, this one anthropology. But Dad says study law; that’s where the money is. Okay, that’s the decision. And you know what my answer would be—where your enthusiasm is. So I have a little word: ‘Follow your bliss.’ The bliss is the message of God to yourself. That’s where your life is.
From Understanding Mythology: an interview of Joseph Campbell by Jeffrey Mishlove.”
Stephen Gerringer
tie-dyed teller of talesHello,
It’s very interesting to follow the trajectory of the Canonical and apocryphal Joseph Campbell … Authorship and attribution can be a sticky wicket.
R³
Seems to be part of the mythologization process that is always ongoing (for example, throughout the late 19th and 20th centuries, the iconic figures of Abraham Lincoln or Mark Twain served as a magnet; all sorts of witticisms they never said were attributed to them in popular lore, giving those sayings added weight, in the same way as pungent societal critiques today are often attributed to the late comedian George Carlin)
Stephen Gerringer
tie-dyed teller of talesStephen,
Yes , for me, brings the academic consensus that the Gospels were written by anonymous writers attributed to Evangelists to mind. Things do tend to snowball over time. This is why cannons and foundational institutions are formed. May the reproduction of Joseph Campbell’s (JC’s) words be forever true to his spirit. It is always good to seek the source the wellspring the font the Q quelle.
R³
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