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

More quotes by Joseph Campbell

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You can't have creativity unless you leave behind the bounded, the fixed, all the rules
Joseph Campbell
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The familiar life horizon has been outgrown: the old concepts, ideals, and emotional patterns no longer fit the time for the passing of a threshold is at hand.
Joseph Campbell
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Life is but a mask worn on the face of death. And is death, then, but another mask? 'How many can say,' asks the Aztec poet, 'that there is, or is not, a truth beyond?'
Joseph Campbell
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Nothing can happen to you that is not positive. Even though it looks and feels at the moment like a negative crisis, it is not. The crisis throws you back, and when you are required to exhibit strength, it comes.
Joseph Campbell
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This is an important point about symbols: they do not refer to historical events they refer through historical events to spiritual or psychological principles and powers that are of yesterday, today, and tomorrow, and that are everywhere.
Joseph Campbell
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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.
Joseph Campbell
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It's a shame to waste [the uniqueness that is you], by doing what someone else has done.
Joseph Campbell
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The principle of compassion is that which converts disillusionment into a participatory companionship. This is the basic love, the charity, that turns a critic into a living human being who has something to give to - as well as to demand of - the world.
Joseph Campbell
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Life will always be sorrowful. We can't change it, but we can change our attitude toward it.
Joseph Campbell
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Myths are so intimately bound to culture, time, and place that unless the symbols, the metaphors, are kept alive by constant recreation through the arts, the life just slips away from them.
Joseph Campbell
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And so Galahad decided that it would be a disgrace to set off on a quest with the other knights. Alone he would enter the dark forest where there was no path. This is the myth of The Hero's Journey.
Joseph Campbell
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When you are on your path, and it is truly your path, doors will open for you where there were no doors for someone else.
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.
Joseph Campbell
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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.
Joseph Campbell
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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.
Joseph Campbell
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The goal of life is to make your heartbeat match the beat of the universe, to match your nature with Nature.
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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There is no greater privilege in life than being yourself.
Joseph Campbell
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The call to adventure signifies that destiny has summoned the hero.
Joseph Campbell
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The Garden is a metaphor for the following: our minds, and our thinking in terms of pairs of opposites--man and woman, good and evil--are as holy as that of a god. (50)
Joseph Campbell