Quote

If you see your path laid out in front of you - Step one, Step two, Step three - you only know one thing . . . it is not your path. Your path is created in the moment of action. If you can see it laid out in front of you, you can be sure it is someone else's path. That is why you see it so clearly.

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
Thing
Sure
Laid
Moment
Clearly
Action
Fronts
Moments
Front
Three
Created
Else
Step
Two
Steps
Someone
Path

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The big question is whether you are going to be able to say a hearty yes to your adventure.
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The goal is to live with God like composure on the full rush of energy, like Dionysus riding the leopard, without being torn to pieces.
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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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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.
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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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As a white candle / In a holy place, / So is the beauty / Of an aged face
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Mythology is often defined as 'other peoples' religions', religion can be thought of as misinterpreted mythology.
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If you are on the right path you will find that invisible hands are helping.
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When you no longer are compelled by desire and fear . . . when you have seen the radiance in eternity from all forms of time . . . when you follow your bliss . . . doors will open where you would not have thought there were doors . . . and the world will step in and help.
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You must have a room, or a certain hour or so a day, where you don't know what was in the newspapers that morning a place where you can simply experience and bring forth what you are and what you might be.
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The seat of the soul is where the inner world and the outer world meet.
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The latest incarnation of Oedipus, the continued romance of Beauty and the Beast, stand this afternoon on the corner of Forty-second Street and Fifth Avenue, waiting for the traffic light to change.
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The folktale is the primer of the picture-language of the soul.
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There is no way you can use the word “reality” without quotation marks around it.
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Where you stumble and fall, there you will find gold.
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Perfection isn't human. Human beings are not perfect. What evokes our love--and I mean love, not lust--is the imperfection of the human being. So, when the imperfection of the real person peaks through, say, 'This is a challenge to my compassion.' Then make a try, and something might begin to get going.
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Man actually needs the striving and struggling for some goal worthy of him.
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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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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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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)
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