Quote

Shakespeare said that art is a mirror held up to nature. And that’s what it is. The nature is your nature, and all of these wonderful poetic images of mythology are referring to something in you. When your mind is trapped by the image out there so that you never make the reference to yourself, you have misread the image.

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
Mirror
Misread
Mind
Referring
Something
Myth
Reference
Make
Mirrors
Mythology
Never
Held
Shakespeare
Image
Trapped
Wonderful
Poetic
Art
Images
Nature

More quotes by 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.
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Opportunities to find deeper powers within ourselves come when life seems most challenging.
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Out of perfection nothing can be made. Every process involves breaking something up.
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The goal of life is to make your heartbeat match the beat of the universe, to match your nature with Nature.
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Art is the set of wings to carry you out of your own entanglement.
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Whatever the hell happens, say, 'This is what I need.'
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Eternity is not a long time rather, it is another dimension. It is that dimension to which time-thinking shuts us. And so there never was a creation. Rather, there is a continuous creating going on. This energy is pouring into every cell of our being right now, every board and brick of the buildings we sit in, every grain of sand and wisp of wind.
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What's made up in the head is the fiction. What comes out of the heart is a myth.
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When an idea is important to a person or culture it will find its way into imagery.
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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.
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Mythology may, in a real sense, be defined as other people's religion. And religion may, in a sense, be understood as popular misunderstanding of mythology. (8)
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Regrets are illuminations come too late.
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Myths are clues to the spiritual potentialities of the human life.
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Every act has both good and evil results. The best we can do is lean to the light.
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If there were already a path, it would have to be someone else's the whole point is to find your own way.
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It is not only that there is no hiding place for the gods from the searching telescope and microscope there is no such society any more as the gods once supported.
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At such moments, you realize that you and the other are, in fact, one. It's a big realization. Survival is the second law of life. The first is that we are all one.
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We have to permit go with the everyday living we had prepared so as to have the lifetime that's watching for us
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It's a shame to waste [the uniqueness that is you], by doing what someone else has done.
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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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