Quote

I think of mythology as the homeland of the muses, the inspirers of art, the inspirers of poetry. To see life as a poem and yourself participating in a poem is what the myth does for you.

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
Thinking
Mythology
Life
Participation
Poem
Myth
Poetry
Muses
Art
Participating
Doe
Homeland
Think
Muse

More quotes by Joseph Campbell

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Myths are clues to the spiritual potentialities of the human life.
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Survival is the second law of life. The first is that we are all one.
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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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There is an Indian fable of three beings who drank from a river: one was a god, and he drank ambrosia one was a man, and he drank water and one was a demon, and he drank filth. What you get is a function of your own consciousness.
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Privation and suffering alone open the mind to all that is hidden to others. (Igjugarjuk)
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What am I? Am I the bulb that carries the light, or am I the light of which the bulb is a vehicle?
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The hero, whether god or goddess, man or woman, the figure in a myth or the dreamer of a dream discovers and assimilates his opposite (his own unsuspected self) either by swallowing it or by being swallowed.
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You have been thinking one way. Now you have to think a different way.
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It is by going down into the abyss that we recover the treasures of life. Where you stumble, there lies your treasure.
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If you can see your path clearly in front of you, it's probably someone else's.
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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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Religon is misunderstood mythology
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The entire heavenly realm is within us, but to find it we have to relate to what's outside.
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Whatever the hell happens, say, 'This is what I need.'
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Successful marriage is leading innovative lives together, being open, non-programmed. It’s a free fall: how you handle each new thing as it comes along. As a drop of oil on the sea, you must float, using intellect and compassion to ride the waves.
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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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The folktale is the primer of the picture-language of the soul.
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Your adventure has to be coming out of your own interior. If you are ready for it then doors will open where there were no doors before, and where there would not be doors for anyone else. And you must have courage. It's the call to adventure, which means there is no security, no rules.
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Mephistopheles, the machine man, can provide us with all the means, and is thus likely to determine the aims of life as well. But of course the characteristic of Faust, which makes him eligible to be saved, is that he seeks aims that are not those of the machine.
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You've got to find the force inside you.
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