Quote

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
Bring
Alive
Whatever
Inspirational
Without
Ascribe
Life
Encouraging
Cancer
Meaning

More quotes by Joseph Campbell

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Myths are public dreams, dreams are private myths.
Joseph Campbell
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Participate joyfully in the sorrows of the world. We cannot cure the world of sorrows, but we can choose to live in joy.
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Mephistopheles, the machine man, can provide us with all the means, and is thus likely to determine the aims of life as well. But of course the characteristic of Faust, which makes him eligible to be saved, is that he seeks aims that are not those of the machine.
Joseph Campbell
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The actual point in question, throughout the centuries of Christian persecution, has never been faith in God, but faith in the Bible as the word of God, and in the Church (this Church or that) as the interpreter of that word.
Joseph Campbell
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For the bliss of the deep abode is not lightly abandoned in favor of the self-scattering of the wakened state.
Joseph Campbell
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A hero is someone who has given his or her life to something bigger than oneself.
Joseph Campbell
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It may be a species of impudence to think that the way you understand God is the way God is. (60).
Joseph Campbell
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What is required is the finding of that Immovable Point within one's self, which is not shaken by any of those tempests which the Buddhists call 'the eight karmic winds': 1-fear of pain, 2-desire for pleasure 3-fear of loss 4-desire for gain 5-fear of blame, 6-desire for praise 7-fear of disgrace [and] 8-desire for fame.
Joseph Campbell
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If you see your path laid out in front of you - Step one, Step two, Step three - you only know one thing . . . it is not your path. Your path is created in the moment of action. If you can see it laid out in front of you, you can be sure it is someone else's path. That is why you see it so clearly.
Joseph Campbell
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Poets are simply those who have made a profession and a lifestyle of being in touch with their bliss.
Joseph Campbell
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Regrets are illuminations come too late.
Joseph Campbell
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The realms of the gods and demons - heaven, purgatory, hell - are of the substance of dreams. Myth, in this view, is the dream of the world.
Joseph Campbell
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Poetry comes out of an elite experience, the experience of people whose ears are opened to the song of the universe.
Joseph Campbell
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When you no longer are compelled by desire and fear . . . when you have seen the radiance in eternity from all forms of time . . . when you follow your bliss . . . doors will open where you would not have thought there were doors . . . and the world will step in and help.
Joseph Campbell
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All life stinks and you must embrace that with compassion.
Joseph Campbell
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If you follow your bliss...the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living.
Joseph Campbell
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Every hero must have the courage to be alone, to take the journey for himself.
Joseph Campbell
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Every act has both good and evil results. The best we can do is lean to the light.
Joseph Campbell
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The images of Myth are reflections of Spiritual and Depth potentialities of every one of us. Through contemplating those we evoke those powers in our own lives to operate through ourselves.
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The Garden is a metaphor for the following: our minds, and our thinking in terms of pairs of opposites--man and woman, good and evil--are as holy as that of a god. (50)
Joseph Campbell