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If we fix on the old, we get stuck.

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
Stuck

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.
Joseph Campbell
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This is an essential experience of any mystical realization. You die to your flesh and are born into your spirit. You identify yourself with the consciousness and life of which your body is but the vehicle. You die to the vehicle and become identified in your consciousness with that of which the vehicle is but the carrier. That is the God.
Joseph Campbell
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The seat of the soul is where the inner world and the outer world meet.
Joseph Campbell
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Out of perfection nothing can be made. Every process involves breaking something up.
Joseph Campbell
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Economics and politics are the governing powers of life today, and that's why everything is so screwy.
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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It's characteristic of democracy that majority rule is understood as being effective not only in politics but also in thinking. In thinking, of course, the majority is always wrong.
Joseph Campbell
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The ultimate dreamer is Vishnu floating on the cosmic Milky Ocean, couched upon the coils of the abyssal serpent Ananta, the meaning of whose name is Unending. In the foreground stand the five Pandava brothers, heroes of the epic Mahabharata, with Draupadi, their wife: allegorically, she is the mind and they are the five senses.
Joseph Campbell
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Life has no meaning. Each of us has meaning and we bring it to life. It is a waste to be asking the question when you are the answer.
Joseph Campbell
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Every hero must have the courage to be alone, to take the journey for himself.
Joseph Campbell
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The experience of Eternity right here and now, is the function of life.
Joseph Campbell
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Religon is misunderstood mythology
Joseph Campbell
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We need myths that will identify the individual not with his local group but with the planet.
Joseph Campbell
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I think of mythology as the homeland of the muses, the inspirers of art, the inspirers of poetry. To see life as a poem and yourself participating in a poem is what the myth does for you.
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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The function of artists is the mythologization of the world.
Joseph Campbell
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The ultimate aim of the quest must be neither release nor ecstasy for oneself, but the wisdom and the power to serve others.
Joseph Campbell
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The Garden is a metaphor for the following: our minds, and our thinking in terms of pairs of opposites--man and woman, good and evil--are as holy as that of a god. (50)
Joseph Campbell
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Every myth is psychologically symbolic. Its narratives and images are to be read, therefore, not literally, but as metaphors.
Joseph Campbell
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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.
Joseph Campbell