Quote

We're so engaged in doing things to achieve purposes of outer value that we forget the inner value, the rapture that is associated with being alive, is what it is all about.

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
Values
Inner
Inspirational
Value
Things
Achieve
Alive
Rapture
Wisdom
Associated
Forget
Outer
Purpose
Purposes
Happiness
Engaged

More quotes by Joseph Campbell

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How does the ordinary person come to the transcendent? For a start, I would say, study poetry. Learn how to read a poem. You need not have the experience to get the message, or at least some indication of the message. It may come gradually. (92)
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He who thinks he knows, doesn't know. He who knows that he doesn't know, knows.
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Once you know the difference between right and wrong, you have lots fewer decisions to make.
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You don't ask what a dance means. You enjoy it. You don't ask what the world means. You enjoy it. You don't ask what you mean. You enjoy it.
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We need myths that will identify the individual not with his local group but with the planet.
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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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The courage to face the trials and to bring a whole new body of possibilities into the field of interpreted experience for other people to experience - that is the hero's deed.
Joseph Campbell
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Opportunities to find deeper powers within ourselves come when life seems most challenging. Negativism to the pain and ferocity of life is negativism to life. We are not there until we can say 'yea' to it all.
Joseph Campbell
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One looks, looks long, and the world comes in.
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Money is congealed energy, and releasing it releases life's possibilities.
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There have been systems of religion where the mother is the prime parent, the source, and she's really a more immediate parent than the father, because one is born from the mother...so that the image of the woman is the image of the world.
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I think of mythology as the homeland of the muses, the inspirers of art, the inspirers of poetry. To see life as a poem and yourself participating in a poem is what the myth does for you.
Joseph Campbell
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Man should not be in the service of society, society should be in the service of man. When man is in the service of society, you have a monster state, and that's what is threatening the world at this minute.
Joseph Campbell
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When you follow your bliss, you begin to meet people who are in the field of your bliss, and they open the doors to you.
Joseph Campbell
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The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek. Fear of the unknown is our greatest fear. Many of us would enter a tiger's lair before we would enter a dark cave. While caution is a useful instinct, we lose many opportunities and much of the adventure of life if we fail to support the curious explorer within us.
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It's characteristic of democracy that majority rule is understood as being effective not only in politics but also in thinking. In thinking, of course, the majority is always wrong.
Joseph Campbell
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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
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At such moments, you realize that you and the other are, in fact, one. It's a big realization. Survival is the second law of life. The first is that we are all one.
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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Our life evokes our character. You find out more about yourself as you go on. That's why it's good to put yourself in situations that will evoke your higher nature rather than your lower.
Joseph Campbell