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What's made up in the head is the fiction. What comes out of the heart is a myth.

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
Head
Comes
Heart
Made
Myth
Fiction

More quotes by Joseph Campbell

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Every people is a chosen people in its own mind. And it is rather amusing that their name for themselves usually means mankind.
Joseph Campbell
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There's something inside you that knows when you're in the center, that knows when you're on the beam or off the beam. And if you get off the beam to earn money, you've lost your life. And if you stay in the center and don't get any money, you still have your bliss.
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What gods are there, what gods have there ever been, that were not from man's imagination?
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Where you stumble and fall, there you will find gold.
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The latest incarnation of Oedipus, the continued romance of Beauty and the Beast, stand this afternoon on the corner of Forty-second Street and Fifth Avenue, waiting for the traffic light to change.
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Eternity is not future or past. Eternity is a dimension of now. It is a dimension of the human spirit -- which is eternal. Find that eternal dimension in yourself, and you will ride through time, and throughout the whole length of your days.
Joseph Campbell
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Change the focus of the eye. When you have done that, then the end of the world as you formerly knew it will have occurred, and you will experience the radiance of the divine presence everywhere, here and now.
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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An old Apache storyteller reminds us
Joseph Campbell
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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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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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Once you know the difference between right and wrong, you have lots fewer decisions to make.
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Your adventure has to be coming out of your own interior. If you are ready for it then doors will open where there were no doors before, and where there would not be doors for anyone else. And you must have courage. It's the call to adventure, which means there is no security, no rules.
Joseph Campbell
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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.
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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The hero, therefore, is the man or woman who has been able to battle past his personal and local historical limitations.
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
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Life is a guy trying to play a violin solo in public, while learning the music and his instrument at the same time.
Joseph Campbell
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Preachers err by trying to talk people into belief better they reveal the radiance of their own discovery.
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One looks, looks long, and the world comes in.
Joseph Campbell