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The mighty hero of extraordinary powers, able to lift Mount Govardhan on a finger, and to fill himself with the terrible glory of the universe, is each of us: not the physical self visible in the mirror, but the King within.

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
Universe
Fingers
Lift
Able
Extraordinary
Lifts
Self
Kings
Fill
Physical
Visible
Hero
Mirror
Glory
Powers
Mount
Terrible
Mirrors
Finger
Within
King
Mighty

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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.
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Our demons are our own limitations, which shut us off from the realization of the ubiquity of the spirit . . . each of these demons is conquered in a vision quest.
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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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People who don't have a concept of the whole can do very unfortunate things.
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At such moments, you realize that you and the other are, in fact, one. It's a big realization. Survival is the second law of life. The first is that we are all one.
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Don't do anything that isn't play
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God is the experience of looking at a tree and saying, 'Ah!
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When you are on your path, and it is truly your path, doors will open for you where there were no doors for someone else.
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The unconscious sends all sorts of vapors, odd beings, terrors, and deluding images up into the mind - whether in dream, broad daylight, or insanity: for the human kingdom, beneath the floor of the comparatively neat little dwelling that we call our consciousness, goes down into unsuspected Aladdin caves.
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Within the field of a secular society, which is a sort of neutral frame that allows individuals to develop their own lives, so long as they don't annoy their neighbors too much, each of us has an individual myth that's driving us, which we may or may not know.
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Every myth is psychologically symbolic. Its narratives and images are to be read, therefore, not literally, but as metaphors.
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A one sentence definition of mythology? Mythology is what we call someone else's religion.
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If you are on the right path you will find that invisible hands are helping.
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The myth does not point to a fact the myth points beyond facts to something that informs the fact
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If you follow someone else's way, you are not going to realize your potential.
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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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There is no security in following the call to adventure.
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What's made up in the head is the fiction. What comes out of the heart is a myth.
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We must be willing to get rid of the life we've planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us. The old skin has to be shed before the new one can come. -
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You don't have to believe that there was a King Arthur to get the significance of those stories, but Christians say we have to believe there was a Christ, or the miracles don't make sense.
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