Quote

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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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
Three
Demon
Men
River
Indian
Rivers
Ambrosia
Function
Fable
Beings
Filth
Consciousness
Fables
Water
Drank

More quotes by Joseph Campbell

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The inner world is the world of your requirements and your energies and your structure and your possibilities that meets the outer world. And the outer world is the field of your incarnation. That’s where you are. You’ve got to keep both going. As Novalis said, ‘The seat of the soul is there where the inner and outer worlds meet.
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I don't need faith. I have experience.
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We're so engaged in doing things to achieve purposes of outer value that we forget the inner value, the rapture that is associated with being alive, is what it is all about.
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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.
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I don't believe people are looking for the meaning of life as much as they are looking for the experience of being alive.
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There is a condescension on the part of the infinite to the mind of man. That is what looks like God.
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We have today to learn to get back into accord with the wisdom of nature and realize again our brotherhood with the animals and with the water and the sea.
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Privation and suffering alone open the mind to all that is hidden to others. (Igjugarjuk)
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One of our problems today is that we are not well acquainted with the literature of the spirit. We re interested in the news of the day and the problems of the hour.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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You enter the forest at the darkest point, where there is no path. Where there is a way or path, it is someone else's path. You are not on your own path. If you follow someone else's way, you are not going to realize your potential.
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What is required is the finding of that Immovable Point within one's self, which is not shaken by any of those tempests which the Buddhists call 'the eight karmic winds': 1-fear of pain, 2-desire for pleasure 3-fear of loss 4-desire for gain 5-fear of blame, 6-desire for praise 7-fear of disgrace [and] 8-desire for fame.
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Any disaster you can survive is an improvement in your character, your stature, and your life
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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.
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An old Apache storyteller reminds us
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Gods suppressed become devils, and often it is these devils whom we first encounter when we turn inward.
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He who thinks he knows, doesn't know. He who knows that he doesn't know, knows.
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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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