Quote

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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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
Place
Myth
Recreation
Time
Kept
Myths
Life
Constant
Slips
Unless
Metaphor
Alive
Bound
Culture
Symbols
Away
Arts
Intimately
Art
Bounds
Metaphors

More quotes by Joseph Campbell

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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.
Joseph Campbell
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Sit in a room and read--and read and read. And read the right books by the right people. Your mind is brought onto that level, and you have a nice, mild, slow-burning rapture all the time.
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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I don't need faith. I have experience.
Joseph Campbell
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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)
Joseph Campbell
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Your sacred space is where you can find yourself again and again.
Joseph Campbell
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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.
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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Find a place inside where there's joy, and the joy will burn out the pain.
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There have been systems of religion where the mother is the prime parent, the source, and she's really a more immediate parent than the father, because one is born from the mother...so that the image of the woman is the image of the world.
Joseph Campbell
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You've got to find the force inside you.
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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All the old bindings are broken. Cosmological centers now are anywhere and everywhere. The earth is a heavenly body, most beautiful of all, and all poetry is now archaic that fails to match the wonder of this view.
Joseph Campbell
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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.
Joseph Campbell
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There is no security in following the call to adventure.
Joseph Campbell
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Where you stumble and fall, there you will find gold.
Joseph Campbell
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The privilege of a lifetime is beingwho you are.The goal of the hero tripdown to the jewel pointis to find those levels in the psychethat open, open, openand finally open to the mystery of your Selfbeing Buddha consciousnessor the Christ.That's the journey.
Joseph Campbell
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There is no way you can use the word “reality” without quotation marks around it.
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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.
Joseph Campbell
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The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek. Fear of the unknown is our greatest fear. Many of us would enter a tiger's lair before we would enter a dark cave. While caution is a useful instinct, we lose many opportunities and much of the adventure of life if we fail to support the curious explorer within us.
Joseph Campbell