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Midlife is when you reach the top of the ladder and find that it was against the wrong wall.

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
Find
Life
Ladder
Ladders
Reach
Wall
Wrong

More quotes by Joseph Campbell

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All life stinks and you must embrace that with compassion.
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How teach again, however, what has been taught correctly and incorrectly learned a thousand thousand times, throughout the millenniums of mankind's prudent folly? That is the hero's ultimate difficult task.
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Myths are the world's dreams. They are archetypal dreams and deal with great human problems. Myths and dreams come from the same place. They come from realizations of some kind that then have to find expression in symbolic form.
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Life is not a problem to be solved but a mystery to be lived. Follow the path that is no path, follow your bliss.
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Sin always finds it's root in our own selfish desires and self-gratification.
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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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At the darkest moment comes the light.
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One way or another, we all have to find what best fosters the flowering of our humanity in this contemporary life, and dedicate ourselves to that.
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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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Participate joyfully in the sorrows of life
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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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When people find out what it is that's ticking in them, they get straightened out.
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In meditating, meditate on your own divinity. The goal of life is to be a vehicle for something higher. Keep your eyes up there between the world of opposites watching your 'play' in the world.Let the world be as it is and learn to rock with 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 priests used to say that faith can move mountains, and nobody believed them. Today the scientists say that they can level mountains, and nobody doubts them.
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What's made up in the head is the fiction. What comes out of the heart is a myth.
Joseph Campbell
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You don't ask what a dance means. You enjoy it. You don't ask what the world means. You enjoy it. You don't ask what you mean. You enjoy it.
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Our life has become so economic and practical in its orientation that, as you get older, the claims of the moment upon you are so great, you hardly know where the hell you are, or what it is you intended. You are always doing something that is required of you. Where is your bliss station? You have to try to find it.
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He must put aside his pride, his virtue, beauty and life and bow or submit to the absolutely intolerable.
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If you are to advance, all fixed ideas must go.
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