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Suddenly you’re ripped into being alive. And life is pain, and life is suffering, and life is horror, but my god you’re alive and its spectacular.

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
Suffering
Pain
Life
Ripped
Spectacular
Suddenly
Horror
Motivational
Alive

More quotes by Joseph Campbell

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Out of perfection nothing can be made. Every process involves breaking something up.
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Man actually needs the striving and struggling for some goal worthy of him.
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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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The myth is the public domain and the dream is the private myth. If your private myth, your dream, happens to coincide with that of the society, you are in good accord with your group. If it isn't, you've got a long adventure in the dark forest ahead of you.
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Myths are clues to the spiritual potentialities of the human life.
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Dream is personalized myth, myth is depersonalized dream both myth and dream are symbolic in the same general way of the dynamics of the psyche. But in the dream the forms are quirked by the peculiar troubles of the dreamer, whereas in myth the problem and solutions shown are directly valid for all mankind.
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The purpose of the journey is compassion. When you have come past the pairs of opposites, you have reached compassion.
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It's characteristic of democracy that majority rule is understood as being effective not only in politics but also in thinking. In thinking, of course, the majority is always wrong.
Joseph Campbell
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The creative act is not hanging on, but yielding to a new creative movement. Awe is what moves us forward.
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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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Now I found it in writing sentences. You can write that sentence in a way that you would have written it last year. Or you can write it in the way of the exquisite nuance that is sriting in your mind now. But that takes a lot of ... waiting for the right word to come.
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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.
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Man should not be in the service of society, society should be in the service of man. When man is in the service of society, you have a monster state, and that's what is threatening the world at this minute.
Joseph Campbell
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You've got to say yes to this miracle of life as it is, not on condition that it follow your rules.
Joseph Campbell
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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.
Joseph Campbell
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I think what we lack isn't science, but poetry that reveals what the heart is ready to recognize
Joseph Campbell
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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.
Joseph Campbell
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I think of compassion as the fundamental religious experience and, unless that is there, you have nothing.
Joseph Campbell
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If you do follow your bliss you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living... Follow your bliss and don't be afraid, and doors will open where you didn't know they were going to be.
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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.
Joseph Campbell