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Life
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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.
Joseph Campbell
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A bit of advice Given to a young Native American At the time of his initiation: As you go the way of life, You will see a great chasm. Jump. It is not as wide as you think.
Joseph Campbell
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Our life has become so economic and practical in its orientation that, as you get older, the claims of the moment upon you are so great, you hardly know where the hell you are, or what it is you intended. You are always doing something that is required of you. Where is your bliss station? You have to try to find it.
Joseph Campbell
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Modern romance, like Greek tragedy, celebrates the mystery of dismemberment, which is life in time. The happy ending is justly scorned as a misrepresentation; for the world, as we know it, as we have seen it, yields but one ending: death, disintegration, dismemberment, and the crucifixion of our heart with the passing of the forms that we have loved.
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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A hero is someone who has given his or her life to something bigger than oneself.
Joseph Campbell
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Love is the burning point of life, and since all life is sorrowful, so is love. The stronger the love, the more the pain. Love itself is pain, you might say -the pain of being truly alive.
Joseph Campbell
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Mephistopheles, the machine man, can provide us with all the means, and is thus likely to determine the aims of life as well. But of course the characteristic of Faust, which makes him eligible to be saved, is that he seeks aims that are not those of the machine.
Joseph Campbell
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What we're learning in our schools is not the wisdom of life. We're learning technologies, we're getting information. There's a curious reluctance on the part of faculties to indicate the life values of their subjects.
Joseph Campbell
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What we are really living for is the experience of life, both the pain and the pleasure.
Joseph Campbell
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The conquest of the fear of death is the recovery of life's joy. One can experience an unconditional affirmation of life only when one has accepted death, not as contrary to life, but as an aspect of life. Life in its becoming is always shedding death, and on the point of death. The conquest of fear yields the courage of life. That is the cardinal initiation of every heroic adventure - fearlessness and achievement.
Joseph Campbell
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Moyers:
Unlike heroes such as Prometheus or Jesus, we're not going on our journey to save the world but to save ourselves.
Campbell:
But in doing that you save the world. The influence of a vital person vitalizes, there's no doubt about it. The world without spirit is a wasteland. People have the notion of saving the world by shifting things around, changing the rules, and who's on top, and so forth. No, no! Any world is a valid world if it's alive. The thing to do is to bring life to it, and the only way to do that is to find in your own case where the life is and become alive yourself.
Joseph Campbell
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Moyers:
Do you ever have the sense of... being helped by hidden hands?
Campbell:
All the time. It is miraculous. I even have a superstition that has grown on me as a result of invisible hands coming all the time — namely, that if you do follow your bliss you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. When you can see that, you begin to meet people who are in your field of bliss, and they open doors to you. I say, follow your bliss and don't be afraid, and doors will open where you didn't know they were going to be.
Joseph Campbell
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Eternity isn't some later time. Eternity isn't a long time. Eternity has nothing to do with time. Eternity is that dimension of here and now which thinking and time cuts out. This is it. And if you don't get it here, you won't get it anywhere. And the experience of eternity right here and now is the function of life.
Joseph Campbell
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If you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track, which has been there all the while waiting for you, and the life you ought to be living is the one you are living. Follow your bliss and don't be afraid, and doors will open where you didn't know they were going to be.
Joseph Campbell
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The myths of failure touch us with the tragedy of life, but those of success only with their own incredibility.
Joseph Campbell
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One way or another, we all have to find what best fosters the flowering of our humanity in this contemporary life, and dedicate ourselves to that.
Joseph Campbell
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Heresy is the life of a mythology, and orthodoxy is the death.
Joseph Campbell
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The perfect human being is uninteresting-the Buddha who leaves the world, you know. It is the imperfections of life that are lovable.
Joseph Campbell
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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.
Joseph Campbell
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If marriage isn't a first priority in your life, you're not married.
Joseph Campbell
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This is the threat to our lives. We all face it. We all operate in our society in relation to a system. Now is the system going to eat you up and relieve you of your humanity or are you going to be able to use the system to human purposes? … If the person doesn't listen to the demands of his own spiritual and heart life and insists on a certain program, you're going to have a schizophrenic crack-up. The person has put himself off center. He has aligned himself with a programmatic life and it's not the one the body's interested in at all. And the world's full of people who have stopped listening to themselves.
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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He must put aside his pride, his virtue, beauty and life and bow or submit to the absolutely intolerable.
Joseph Campbell
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We can safely say, therefore, that whereas some moralists may find it possible to make a distinction between two spheres and reigns-one of flesh, the other of the spirit, one of time, the other of eternity-where ever love arises such definitions vanish, and a sense of life awakens in which all such oppositions are at one.
Joseph Campbell
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Quote of the day
Be a sinner and sin strongly, but more strongly have faith and rejoice in Christ.
Martin Luther
Joseph Campbell
Creative Commons
Born:
March 26, 1904
Died:
October 30, 1987
(aged 83)
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