Quote

There is no make-believe about heaven, future bliss, and compensation, to alleviate the bitter majesty, but only utter darkness, the void of unfulfillment, to receive and eat back the lives that have been tossed forth from the womb only to fail.

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
Lives
Receive
Tossed
Back
Forth
Alleviate
Believe
Bitter
Compensation
Make
Fail
Utter
Failing
Majesty
Darkness
Womb
Heaven
Void
Future
Bliss

More quotes by Joseph Campbell

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Every act has both good and evil results. The best we can do is lean to the light.
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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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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.
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Thinking in mythological terms helps to put you in accord with the inevitables of this vale of tears. You learn to recognize the positive values in what appear to be the negative moments and aspects of your life. The big question is whether you are going to be able to say a hearty yes to your adventure.
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Man should not be in the service of society, society should be in the service of man. When man is in the service of society, you have a monster state, and that's what is threatening the world at this minute.
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The hero, whether god or goddess, man or woman, the figure in a myth or the dreamer of a dream discovers and assimilates his opposite (his own unsuspected self) either by swallowing it or by being swallowed.
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Myths are clues to the spiritual potentialities of the human life.
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Participate joyfully in the sorrows of the world. We cannot cure the world of sorrows, but we can choose to live in joy.
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Money is congealed energy, and releasing it releases life's possibilities.
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A one sentence definition of mythology? Mythology is what we call someone else's religion.
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There is no security in following the call to adventure.
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Our life evokes our character. You find out more about yourself as you go on. That's why it's good to put yourself in situations that will evoke your higher nature rather than your lower.
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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.
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The Greeks, it will be recalled, regarded Eros, the god of love, as the eldest of the gods but also as the youngest, born fresh and dewy-eyed in every living heart.
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Marriage is not a love affair. A love affair has to do with immediate personal satisfaction. Marriage is an ordeal it means yielding, time and again. That's why it's a sacrament You give up your personal simplicity to participate in a relationship. And when you're giving, you're not giving to the other person you're giving to the relationship.
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Once you know the difference between right and wrong, you have lots fewer decisions to make.
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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 like arriving late for a movie, having to figure out what was going on without bothering everybody with a lot of questions, and then being unexpectedly called away before you find out how it ends.
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Whenever men have looked for something solid on which to found their lives, they have chosen not the facts in which the world abounds, but the myths of an immemorial imagination.
Joseph Campbell