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Life is without meaning. You bring the meaning to it. The meaning of life is whatever you ascribe it to be. Being alive is the meaning.

Joseph Campbell

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Joseph Campbell
Age: 83 †
Born: 1904
Born: March 26
Died: 1987
Died: October 30
Academic
Anthropologist
Essayist
Ethnologist
Historian
Historian Of Religion
Lecturer
Mythologist
Orator
Researcher
Short Story Writer
White Plains
New York
Joseph John Campbell
Joseph Cambell
Life
Encouraging
Cancer
Meaning
Bring
Alive
Whatever
Inspirational
Without
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More quotes by Joseph Campbell

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How do you find the divine power in yourself? The word enthusiasm means 'filled with a god,' so what makes you enthusiastic? Follow it. So I have a little word: follow your bliss. The bliss is the message of God to yourself. That's where your life is.
Joseph Campbell
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The unconscious sends all sorts of vapors, odd beings, terrors, and deluding images up into the mind - whether in dream, broad daylight, or insanity: for the human kingdom, beneath the floor of the comparatively neat little dwelling that we call our consciousness, goes down into unsuspected Aladdin caves.
Joseph Campbell
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What's made up in the head is the fiction. What comes out of the heart is a myth.
Joseph Campbell
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At first you might find that nothing happens there. But if you have a sacred space and use it, eventually something will happen. Your sacred space is where you find yourself again and again.
Joseph Campbell
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Art is the set of wings to carry you out of your own entanglement.
Joseph Campbell
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All life stinks and you must embrace that with compassion.
Joseph Campbell
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You don't have to believe that there was a King Arthur to get the significance of those stories, but Christians say we have to believe there was a Christ, or the miracles don't make sense.
Joseph Campbell
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A one sentence definition of mythology? Mythology is what we call someone else's religion.
Joseph Campbell
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The best advise is to take it all as if it had been your intention.
Joseph Campbell
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The ultimate aim of the quest must be neither release nor ecstasy for oneself, but the wisdom and the power to serve others.
Joseph Campbell
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Life is but a mask worn on the face of death. And is death, then, but another mask? 'How many can say,' asks the Aztec poet, 'that there is, or is not, a truth beyond?'
Joseph Campbell
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Mythology may, in a real sense, be defined as other people's religion. And religion may, in a sense, be understood as popular misunderstanding of mythology. (8)
Joseph Campbell
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Once you know the difference between right and wrong, you have lots fewer decisions to make.
Joseph Campbell
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The passage of the mythological hero may be over ground, incidentally fundamentally it is inward--into depths where obscure resistances are overcome, and long lost, forgotten powers are revivified, to be made available for the transfiguration of the world.
Joseph Campbell
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The myth is the public domain and the dream is the private myth. If your private myth, your dream, happens to coincide with that of the society, you are in good accord with your group. If it isn't, you've got a long adventure in the dark forest ahead of you.
Joseph Campbell
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I don’t think people are really seeking the meaning of Life. I think we’re seeking an experience of being alive…we want to feel the rapture of being alive
Joseph Campbell
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The theme of the Grail is the bringing of life into what is known as 'the wasteland.' The wasteland is the preliminary theme to which the Grail is the answer. . . It's the world of people living inauthentic lives - doing what they are supposed to do.
Joseph Campbell
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We have to permit go with the everyday living we had prepared so as to have the lifetime that's watching for us
Joseph Campbell
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All the old bindings are broken. Cosmological centers now are anywhere and everywhere. The earth is a heavenly body, most beautiful of all, and all poetry is now archaic that fails to match the wonder of this view.
Joseph Campbell
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Wars and temper tantrums are the makeshifts of ignorance regrets are illuminations come too late.
Joseph Campbell