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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.

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
Universe
Personification
Inspirational
Motivating
Power
Functions
Human
God
Humans
Function
Life
Value
System

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Mythology is often defined as 'other peoples' religions', religion can be thought of as misinterpreted mythology.
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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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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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If you are to advance, all fixed ideas must go.
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An old Apache storyteller reminds us
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The demon that you can swallow gives you it’s power, and the greater life’s pain, the greater life’s reply.
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We must let go of the life we have planned, so as to accept the one that is waiting for us.
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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 It is as when dividing panels are withdrawn from between chambers of very hot and very cold airs: there is a rush of these forces together.
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Once you know the difference between right and wrong, you have lots fewer decisions to make.
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Suddenly you’re ripped into being alive. And life is pain, and life is suffering, and life is horror, but my god you’re alive and its spectacular.
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Life has no meaning. Each of us has meaning and we bring it to life. It is a waste to be asking the question when you are the answer.
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The senses are a kind of reason. Taste, touch and smell, hearing and seeing, are not merely a means to sensation, enjoyable or otherwise, but they are also a means to knowledge - and are, indeed, your only actual means to knowledge.
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Now I found it in writing sentences. You can write that sentence in a way that you would have written it last year. Or you can write it in the way of the exquisite nuance that is sriting in your mind now. But that takes a lot of ... waiting for the right word to come.
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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.
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Art is the set of wings to carry you out of your own entanglement.
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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.
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The perfect human being is uninteresting.
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First you must find your trajectory, and then comes the social coordination.
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If you follow your bliss you will find a path laid out before you that has been waiting for you all along and you will begin to live the life you ought to be living.
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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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