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

More quotes by Joseph Campbell

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Life is a guy trying to play a violin solo in public, while learning the music and his instrument at the same time.
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I don't need faith. I have experience.
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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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I think of compassion as the fundamental religious experience and, unless that is there, you have nothing.
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At the darkest moment comes the light.
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The role of the artist I now understood as that of revealing through the world-surfaces the implicit forms of the soul, and the great agent to assist the artist was the myth.
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There is no make-believe about heaven, future bliss, and compensation, to alleviate the bitter majesty, but only utter darkness, the void of unfulfillment, to receive and eat back the lives that have been tossed forth from the womb only to fail.
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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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The purpose of the journey is compassion. When you have come past the pairs of opposites, you have reached compassion.
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Change the focus of the eye. When you have done that, then the end of the world as you formerly knew it will have occurred, and you will experience the radiance of the divine presence everywhere, here and now.
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Computers are like Old Testament gods lots of rules and no mercy.
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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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We must be willing to get rid of the life we've planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us. The old skin has to be shed before the new one can come. -
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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
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The call to adventure is the point in a person’s life when they are first given notice that everything is going to change, whether they know it or not.
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Wisdom and foolishness are practically the same. Both are indifferent to the opinions of the world
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The god you worship is the one you're capable of becoming.
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Participate joyfully in the sorrows of the world. We cannot cure the world of sorrows, but we can choose to live in joy.
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The problem in our society and in our schools is to inclulcate, without overdoing it, the notion of education, as in the Latin educere--to lead, to bring out what is in someone rather than merely to indoctrinate him/her from the outside. (89)
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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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