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You yourself are participating in the evil, or you are not alive. Whatever you do is evil for somebody. This is one of the ironies of the whole creation.

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
Creation
Somebody
Alive
Whatever
Evil
Whole
Ironies
Participating
Irony

More quotes by 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.
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Life is without meaning. You bring the meaning to it. The meaning of life is whatever you ascribe it to be. Being alive is the meaning.
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When you are falling --- Dive!
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The actual point in question, throughout the centuries of Christian persecution, has never been faith in God, but faith in the Bible as the word of God, and in the Church (this Church or that) as the interpreter of that word.
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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.
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You can't have creativity unless you leave behind the bounded, the fixed, all the rules
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Where you stumble and fall, there you will find gold.
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If marriage isn't a first priority in your life, you're not married.
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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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I don’t think people are really seeking the meaning of Life. I think we’re seeking an experience of being alive…we want to feel the rapture of being alive
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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.
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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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If you have a sacred place and use it, take advantage of it, something will happen.
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The folktale is the primer of the picture-language of the soul.
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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.
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If you are on the right path you will find that invisible hands are helping.
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For the bliss of the deep abode is not lightly abandoned in favor of the self-scattering of the wakened state.
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When your mind is simply trapped by the image out there so that you never make the reference to yourself, you have misread the image.
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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.
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The myths and folk tales of the whole world make clear that the refusal is essentially a refusal to give up what one takes to be one's own interest. The future is regarded not in terms of an unremitting series of deaths and births, but as though one's present system of ideals, virtues, goals, and advantages were to be fixed and made secure.
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