Quote

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.

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
Within
Fail
Holds
Lair
Dark
Adventure
Unknown
Explorer
Opportunity
Seek
Enter
Explorers
Fear
Failing
Treasure
Cave
Many
Lose
Useful
Tiger
Much
Loses
Curious
Caves
Would
Greatest
Opportunities
Tigers
Life
Support
Instinct
Caution

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Just as anyone who listens to the muse will hear, you can write out of your own intention or out of inspiration. There is such a thing. It comes up and talks. And those who have heard deeply the rhythms and hymns of the gods, can recite those hymns in such a way that the gods will be attracted.
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So that's what destiny is: simply the fulfillment of the potentialites of the energies in your own system.
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The world is full of people who have stopped listening to themselves.
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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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We need myths that will identify the individual not with his local group but with the planet.
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A bit of advice Given to a young Native American At the time of his initiation: As you go the way of life, You will see a great chasm. Jump. It is not as wide as you think.
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Where you stumble, there lies your treasure. The very cave you are afraid to enter turns out to be the source of what you are looking for. The damned thing in the cave that was so dreaded has become the center.
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He must put aside his pride, his virtue, beauty and life and bow or submit to the absolutely intolerable.
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The perfect human being is uninteresting.
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The priests used to say that faith can move mountains, and nobody believed them. Today the scientists say that they can level mountains, and nobody doubts them.
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He who thinks he knows, doesn't know. He who knows that he doesn't know, knows.
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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 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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