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You enter the forest at the darkest point, where there is no path. Where there is a way or path, it is someone else's path. You are not on your own path. If you follow someone else's way, you are not going to realize your potential.

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
Way
Realize
Realizing
Path
Darkest
Point
Forest
Inspirational
Forests
Else
Enter
Someone
Potential
Going
Follow

More quotes by Joseph Campbell

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There is a condescension on the part of the infinite to the mind of man. That is what looks like God.
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Man actually needs the striving and struggling for some goal worthy of him.
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Life is not a problem to be solved but a mystery to be lived. Follow the path that is no path, follow your bliss.
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What is a god? A god is a personification of a motivating power of a value system that functions in human life and in the universe.
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In the absence of an effective general mythology, each of us has his private, unrecognized, rudimentary, yet secretly potent pantheon of dreams.
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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)
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All life stinks and you must embrace that with compassion.
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He must put aside his pride, his virtue, beauty and life and bow or submit to the absolutely intolerable.
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Participate joyfully in the sorrows of life
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The problem in our society and in our schools is to inclulcate, without overdoing it, the notion of education, as in the Latin educere--to lead, to bring out what is in someone rather than merely to indoctrinate him/her from the outside. (89)
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The psychotic drowns in the same waters in which the mystic swims with delight.
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Every myth is psychologically symbolic. Its narratives and images are to be read, therefore, not literally, but as metaphors.
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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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Nothing can happen to you that is not positive. Even though it looks and feels at the moment like a negative crisis, it is not. The crisis throws you back, and when you are required to exhibit strength, it comes.
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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.
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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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Hell is life drying up.
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Gods suppressed become devils, and often it is these devils whom we first encounter when we turn inward.
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The Greeks, it will be recalled, regarded Eros, the god of love, as the eldest of the gods but also as the youngest, born fresh and dewy-eyed in every living heart.
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Perfection isn't human. Human beings are not perfect. What evokes our love--and I mean love, not lust--is the imperfection of the human being. So, when the imperfection of the real person peaks through, say, 'This is a challenge to my compassion.' Then make a try, and something might begin to get going.
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