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All life stinks and you must embrace that with compassion.

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
Stinks
Stink
Embrace
Compassion
Inspirational
Must
Life

More quotes by Joseph Campbell

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Myths are public dreams, dreams are private myths. We must be willing to get rid of the life we planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us. I have bought this wonderful machine — a computer ... it seems to me to be an Old Testament god, with a lot of rules and no mercy.
Joseph Campbell
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We must be willing to get rid of the life we've planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us. The old skin has to be shed before the new one can come. -
Joseph Campbell
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Our demons are our own limitations, which shut us off from the realization of the ubiquity of the spirit . . . each of these demons is conquered in a vision quest.
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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 entire heavenly realm is within us, but to find it we have to relate to what's outside.
Joseph Campbell
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Our true reality is in our identity and unity with all life.
Joseph Campbell
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When you realize that eternity is right here now, that it is within your possibility to experience the eternity of your own truth and being, then you grasp the following: That which you are was never born and will never die. . . . (90)
Joseph Campbell
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Writer’s block results from too much head. Cut off your head. Pegasus, poetry, was born of Medusa when her head was cut off. You have to be reckless when writing. Be as crazy as your conscience allows.
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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Life is like arriving late for a movie, having to figure out what was going on without bothering everybody with a lot of questions, and then being unexpectedly called away before you find out how it ends.
Joseph Campbell
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The perfect human being is uninteresting.
Joseph Campbell
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Make your god transparent to the transcendent, and it doesn't matter what his name is.
Joseph Campbell
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Our life has become so economic and practical in its orientation that, as you get older, the claims of the moment upon you are so great, you hardly know where the hell you are, or what it is you intended. You are always doing something that is required of you. Where is your bliss station? You have to try to find it.
Joseph Campbell
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The familiar life horizon has been outgrown: the old concepts, ideals, and emotional patterns no longer fit the time for the passing of a threshold is at hand.
Joseph Campbell
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Every myth is psychologically symbolic. Its narratives and images are to be read, therefore, not literally, but as metaphors.
Joseph Campbell
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There are now no more horizons. And with the dissolution of horizons we have experienced and are experiencing collisions, terrific collisions, not only of peoples but also of their mythologies. It is as when dividing panels are withdrawn from between chambers of very hot and very cold airs: there is a rush of these forces together.
Joseph Campbell
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Man actually needs the striving and struggling for some goal worthy of him.
Joseph Campbell
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I don’t think there is any such thing as an ordinary mortal. Everybody has his own possibility of rapture in the experience of life. All he has to do is recognize it and then cultivate it and get going with it. I always feel uncomfortable when people speak about ordinary mortals because I’ve never met an ordinary man, woman, or child.
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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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The adventure that the hero is ready for is the one he gets.
Joseph Campbell