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There seem to be only two kinds of people: Those who think that metaphors are facts, and those who know that they are not facts. Those who know they are not facts are what we call atheists, and those who think they are facts are religious. Which group really gets the message?

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
Kind
Gets
Metaphor
Really
Seem
Atheist
Think
Call
Message
Thinking
Religious
Kinds
People
Inspirational
Messages
Facts
Group
Two
Atheism
Metaphors
Seems
Groups
Atheists

More quotes by Joseph Campbell

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Midlife is when you reach the top of the ladder and find that it was against the wrong wall.
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When you make the sacrifice in marriage, you're sacrificing not to each other but to unity in a relationship.
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Opportunities to find deeper powers within ourselves come when life seems most challenging.
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When you are on your path, and it is truly your path, doors will open for you where there were no doors for someone else.
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Freud tells us to blame our parents for all the shortcomings of our life, Marx tells us to blame the upper class of our society. But the only one to blame is oneself.
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The principle of compassion is that which converts disillusionment into a participatory companionship. This is the basic love, the charity, that turns a critic into a living human being who has something to give to - as well as to demand of - the world.
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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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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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Economics and politics are the governing powers of life today, and that's why everything is so screwy.
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The way to find out about your happiness is to keep your mind on those moments when you feel most happy, when you really are happy-not excited, not just thrilled, but deeply happy. This requires a little bit of self analysis. What is it that makes you happy? Stay with it, no matter what people tell you. This is what I call following your bliss.
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The inner world is the world of your requirements and your energies and your structure and your possibilities that meets the outer world. And the outer world is the field of your incarnation. That’s where you are. You’ve got to keep both going. As Novalis said, ‘The seat of the soul is there where the inner and outer worlds meet.
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I think what we lack isn't science, but poetry that reveals what the heart is ready to recognize
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How teach again, however, what has been taught correctly and incorrectly learned a thousand thousand times, throughout the millenniums of mankind's prudent folly? That is the hero's ultimate difficult task.
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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 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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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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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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Perhaps some of us have to go through dark and devious ways before we can find the river of peace or the highroad to the soul's destination.
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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 experience of Eternity right here and now, is the function of life.
Joseph Campbell