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This is an important point about symbols: they do not refer to historical events they refer through historical events to spiritual or psychological principles and powers that are of yesterday, today, and tomorrow, and that are everywhere.

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
Events
Refer
Principles
Symbols
Point
Psychological
Spiritual
Powers
Today
Yesterday
Important
Historical
Everywhere
Tomorrow

More quotes by Joseph Campbell

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God is a metaphor for that which transcends all levels of intellectual thought. It's as simple as that.
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The function of the artist is the mythologization of the culture and the world. In the visual arts there were two men whose work handled mythological themes in a marvelous way: Paul Klee and Pablo Picasso.
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There's nothing you can do that's more important than being fulfilled. You become a sign, you become a signal, transparent to transcendence in this way, you will find, live, and become a realization of your own personal myth.
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Myths are public dreams, dreams are private myths.
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Life will always be sorrowful. We can't change it, but we can change our attitude toward it.
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Economics and politics are the governing powers of life today, and that's why everything is so screwy.
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A one sentence definition of mythology? Mythology is what we call someone else's religion.
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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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How do you find the divine power in yourself? The word enthusiasm means 'filled with a god,' so what makes you enthusiastic? Follow it. So I have a little word: follow your bliss. The bliss is the message of God to yourself. That's where your life is.
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What am I? Am I the bulb that carries the light, or am I the light of which the bulb is a vehicle?
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Out of perfection nothing can be made. Every process involves breaking something up.
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The myth is the public domain and the dream is the private myth. If your private myth, your dream, happens to coincide with that of the society, you are in good accord with your group. If it isn't, you've got a long adventure in the dark forest ahead of you.
Joseph Campbell
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Survival is the second law of life. The first is that we are all one.
Joseph Campbell
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The idea of the Bodhisattva is the one who out of his realization of transcendence participates in the world. The imitation of Christ is joyful participation in the sorrows of the world.
Joseph Campbell
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The role of the artist I now understood as that of revealing through the world-surfaces the implicit forms of the soul, and the great agent to assist the artist was the myth.
Joseph Campbell
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So that's what destiny is: simply the fulfillment of the potentialites of the energies in your own system.
Joseph Campbell
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Without passion, men are not willing to pay any price or bear any burden to set the captives free.
Joseph Campbell
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The goal of life is to make your heartbeat match the beat of the universe, to match your nature with Nature.
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One looks, looks long, and the world comes in.
Joseph Campbell
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Now, when Luke Skywalker unmasks his father, he is taking off the machine role that the father has played. The father was the uniform. That is power, the state role.
Joseph Campbell