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Mythology is the womb of mankind's initiation to life and death.

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
Mankind
Death
Men
Life
Initiation
Womb
Mythology

More quotes by Joseph Campbell

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All the old bindings are broken. Cosmological centers now are anywhere and everywhere. The earth is a heavenly body, most beautiful of all, and all poetry is now archaic that fails to match the wonder of this view.
Joseph Campbell
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Whenever men have looked for something solid on which to found their lives, they have chosen not the facts in which the world abounds, but the myths of an immemorial imagination.
Joseph Campbell
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Wars and temper tantrums are the makeshifts of ignorance regrets are illuminations come too late.
Joseph Campbell
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The call to adventure signifies that destiny has summoned the hero.
Joseph Campbell
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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.
Joseph Campbell
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If you see your path laid out in front of you - Step one, Step two, Step three - you only know one thing . . . it is not your path. Your path is created in the moment of action. If you can see it laid out in front of you, you can be sure it is someone else's path. That is why you see it so clearly.
Joseph Campbell
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He must put aside his pride, his virtue, beauty and life and bow or submit to the absolutely intolerable.
Joseph Campbell
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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)
Joseph Campbell
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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.
Joseph Campbell
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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.
Joseph Campbell
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Every hero must have the courage to be alone, to take the journey for himself.
Joseph Campbell
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Eternity is not future or past. Eternity is a dimension of now. It is a dimension of the human spirit -- which is eternal. Find that eternal dimension in yourself, and you will ride through time, and throughout the whole length of your days.
Joseph Campbell
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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.
Joseph Campbell
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Find a place inside where there's joy, and the joy will burn out the pain.
Joseph Campbell
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If marriage isn't a first priority in your life, you're not married.
Joseph Campbell
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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.
Joseph Campbell
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Sin always finds it's root in our own selfish desires and self-gratification.
Joseph Campbell
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I don’t think people are really seeking the meaning of Life. I think we’re seeking an experience of being alive…we want to feel the rapture of being alive
Joseph Campbell
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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.
Joseph Campbell
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The mighty hero of extraordinary powers, able to lift Mount Govardhan on a finger, and to fill himself with the terrible glory of the universe, is each of us: not the physical self visible in the mirror, but the King within.
Joseph Campbell