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The hero, therefore, is the man or woman who has been able to battle past his personal and local historical limitations.

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
Therefore
Personal
Limitations
Woman
Locals
Past
Limitation
Able
Local
Men
Historical
Hero
Battle

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The courage to face the trials and to bring a whole new body of possibilities into the field of interpreted experience for other people to experience - that is the hero's deed.
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The world is full of people who have stopped listening to themselves or have listened only to their neighbors to learn what they ought to do, how they ought to behave, and what the values are they should be living for.
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Thinking in mythological terms helps to put you in accord with the inevitables of this vale of tears. You learn to recognize the positive values in what appear to be the negative moments and aspects of your life. The big question is whether you are going to be able to say a hearty yes to your adventure.
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Eternity isn't some later time. Eternity isn't a long time. Eternity has nothing to do with time. Eternity is that dimension of here and now which thinking and time cuts out. This is it. And if you don't get it here, you won't get it anywhere. And the experience of eternity right here and now is the function of life.
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If you want to find out what it means to have a society without any rituals, read the New York Times.
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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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God is a metaphor for that which transcends all levels of intellectual thought. It's as simple as that.
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Your life is the fruit of your own doing. You have no one to blame but yourself... The problem is not to blame or explain but to handle the life that arises... If you say no to a single factor in your life, you have unraveled the whole thing... The demon that you swallow gives you its power, and the greater life's pain, the greater life's reply.
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Don't do anything that isn't play
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When people find out what it is that's ticking in them, they get straightened out.
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Religon is misunderstood mythology
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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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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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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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The goal is to live with God like composure on the full rush of energy, like Dionysus riding the leopard, without being torn to pieces.
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I don't believe people are looking for the meaning of life as much as they are looking for the experience of being alive.
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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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We're so engaged in doing things to achieve purposes of outer value that we forget the inner value, the rapture that is associated with being alive, is what it is all about.
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The function of the artist is the mythologization of the culture and the world. In the visual arts there were two men whose work handled mythological themes in a marvelous way: Paul Klee and Pablo Picasso.
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You have been thinking one way. Now you have to think a different way.
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