Remarks by Joseph Campbell | V2Melody Quotations

“The human voice—what a wonder and mystery it is!”

Expressing his fascination with the expressive and mysterious power of the human voice · Mearing Stones, The Human Voice

“To hear these children speak Irish the way they do makes one feel that the language of Niall Naoi Giallach is not dead yet, and has, indeed, no signs of dying.”

Finding hope for cultural continuity in the living speech of children · Mearing Stones, Teelin, Bunglass, and Slieve League

“The air is delightfully warm, and the fragrance of sea and bracken and ling is in our hearts.”

Transforming the scents of the landscape into an inward emotional experience · Mearing Stones, Teelin, Bunglass, and Slieve League

“For boys are boys the world over, let the propagandists carp as they will!”

A humorous assertion of shared human nature across cultural and political boundaries · Mearing Stones, Teelin, Bunglass, and Slieve League

“If the Blue Bird is to be found this side of heaven, surely it must be here!”

Associating an idyllic natural place with the almost mythical possibility of happiness · Mearing Stones, Carrick Glen

“The water falls (to me there is no music more beautiful).”

Placing the sound of falling water above every other form of music · Mearing Stones, Carrick Glen

“Here there is quiet; quiet to think, quiet to read, quiet to listen, quiet to do nothing but lie still in the grass and vegetate.”

Celebrating a kind of silence spacious enough for thought, attention and idleness · Mearing Stones, Carrick Glen

“I couldn’t help laughing at first, but after five minutes I felt a sort of strange kinship with the clock—it was a wayfarer like myself.”

Discovering companionship and a reflection of his own wandering life in another creature · Mearing Stones, A Clock

“The sense of tears in me was touched for the clock, and I stooped down to watch it crawling laboriously along in the dust, over a very rough road.”

Finding pathos and fellowship even in the determined journey of a tiny beetle · Mearing Stones, A Clock

“Can we live every day with these aspiring things, and not love beauty?”

Asking whether sustained attention to nature can fail to awaken a love of beauty · Mearing Stones, Nature

“I listen to it in infinite space and quietness.”

Evoking the contemplative stillness in which a small natural sound can seem boundless · Mearing Stones, By Lochros Mór

“What is more beautiful than water falling, or a spray of slán-lus with its flowers?”

Finding sufficient beauty in the simplest encounters with water and wild flowers · Mearing Stones, Water and Slán-Lus

“When I said the sonnet aloud to myself it seemed to rise out of the landscape and to incorporate itself with it again as my voice rose and fell in the wandering cadences of the verse.”

Describing poetry as something capable of becoming inseparable from the landscape in which it is spoken · Mearing Stones, The General Light and Dark

“The king himself is served by the field.”

A concise reminder that even the powerful ultimately depend upon ordinary labour and the earth · Mearing Stones, The Peasant in Literature

Nature
Truth

“And peasants’ thoughts are not such dead and commonplace things that I, who have learnt practically all I know from them, can afford to ignore them now.”

Acknowledging rural people as profound sources of knowledge and imaginative insight · Mearing Stones, The Peasant in Literature

Memory
Truth

“Darkness, freshness, fragrance. Donegal fascinates one like a beautiful girl.”

Condensing his attraction to Donegal into three sensations and a human comparison · Mearing Stones, A Note

“I feel as if I could listen to that tune forever.”

Expressing complete absorption in music touched by melancholy and landscape · Mearing Stones, Summer Dusk

“The fun and devilment of it sets my heart dancing.”

Describing the immediate bodily joy produced by a lively fiddle tune · Mearing Stones, Summer Dusk

Joy
Music

“All subtle, secret things—the smell of bees, twilight on water, a woman’s presence, the humming of a lime-tree in full leaf, a bracken stalk cut through to show the “eagle” in it—all speak to me as to an intimate.”

Revealing his intense responsiveness to small, half-hidden manifestations of beauty · Mearing Stones, All Subtle, Secret Things

“To lie on one’s loin in the sun is all very well, but walking is better. It is over the hill the wonders are.”

Making curiosity and movement the route to discovery and wonder · Mearing Stones, Lying and Walking

“Sunlight is better than wisdom, and the red of the fairy-thimble more than painted fans.”

Preferring immediate natural beauty to learning and artificial ornament · Mearing Stones, Sunlight

“Unless you have seen the sun you cannot know anything.”

Elevating direct experience of the natural world above abstract knowledge · Mearing Stones, Sunlight

Nature
Truth

“Remoteness grips me, and is become a reality in this ultimate mearing of a grey, ultimate land.”

Expressing the almost physical force of isolation at the edge of the landscape · Mearing Stones, In Glen-Columcille

“The hills brood: my thoughts brood with them.”

Compressing the relationship between landscape and inward reflection into a striking image · Mearing Stones, In Glen-Columcille

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