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

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If you're going to have a story, have a big story, or none at all.
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A dream is your creative vision for your life in the future. A goal is what specifically you intend to make happen. Dreams and goals should be just out of your present reach but not out of sight. Dreams and goals are coming attractions in your life.
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Within the field of a secular society, which is a sort of neutral frame that allows individuals to develop their own lives, so long as they don't annoy their neighbors too much, each of us has an individual myth that's driving us, which we may or may not know.
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The best advise is to take it all as if it had been your intention.
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The ultimate dreamer is Vishnu floating on the cosmic Milky Ocean, couched upon the coils of the abyssal serpent Ananta, the meaning of whose name is Unending. In the foreground stand the five Pandava brothers, heroes of the epic Mahabharata, with Draupadi, their wife: allegorically, she is the mind and they are the five senses.
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Without passion, men are not willing to pay any price or bear any burden to set the captives free.
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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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We are kept out of the Garden by our own fear and desire in relation to what we think to be the goods of our life.
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The myth is the public dream and the dream is the private myth.
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Myths are so intimately bound to culture, time, and place that unless the symbols, the metaphors, are kept alive by constant recreation through the arts, the life just slips away from them.
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The call to adventure is the point in a person’s life when they are first given notice that everything is going to change, whether they know it or not.
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When you follow your bliss a kind of track opens up, that's always been there, waiting for you. And the life that you should be living, is the one that you will be living.
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The passage of the mythological hero may be over ground, incidentally fundamentally it is inward--into depths where obscure resistances are overcome, and long lost, forgotten powers are revivified, to be made available for the transfiguration of the world.
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At the darkest moment comes the light.
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At first you might find that nothing happens there. But if you have a sacred space and use it, eventually something will happen. Your sacred space is where you find yourself again and again.
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A one sentence definition of mythology? Mythology is what we call someone else's religion.
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The key to the Grail is compassion, 'suffering with,' feeling another's sorrow as if it were your own. The one who finds the dynamo of compassion is the one who's found the Grail.
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Survival is the second law of life. The first is that we are all one.
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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.
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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.
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