Joseph Campbell - Love Quotes

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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
One cannot predict the next mythology any more than one can predict tonight's dream; for a mythology is not an ideology. It is not something projected from the brain, but something experienced from the heart, from recognition of identities behind or within the appearances of nature, perceiving with love a 'thou' where there would otherwise have been only an 'it.'

Joseph Campbell
When people get married because they think it's a long-time love affair, they'll be divorced very soon, because all love affairs end in disappointment. But marriage is a recognition of a spiritual identity.

Joseph Campbell
Marriage is not a simple love affair, it's an ordeal, and the ordeal is the sacrifice of ego to a relationship in which two have become one.

Joseph Campbell
This death to the logic of emotional commitments of our chance moment in the world of space and time, this recognition of, the shift of our emphasis to, the universal life that throbs and celebrates its victory in the very kiss of our own annihilation, this amor fati, "love of fate," love of the fate that is inevitably death, constitutes the experience of the tragic art...

Joseph Campbell
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
For if anything is capable of making a poet of a literary man, it is my hometown love of the human, the living and ordinary.

Joseph Campbell
The happy ending of the fairy tale, the myth, and the divine comedy of the soul, is to be read, not as a contradiction, but as a transcendence of the universal tragedy of man.... Tragedy is the shattering of the forms and of our attachment to the forms... the two are the terms of a single mythological theme... the down-going and the up-coming (kathados and anodos), which together constitute the totality of the revelation that is life, and which the individual must know and love if he is to be purged (katharsis=purgatorio) of the contagion of sin (disobedience to the divine will) and death (identification with the mortal form).

Joseph Campbell
The seizure of passionate love can be, in such a context, only illicit, breaking in upon the order of one's dutiful life in virtue as a devastating storm.

Joseph Campbell
The principle of compassion is that which converts disillusionment into a participatory companionship. This is the basic love, the charity, that turns a critic into a living human being who has something to give to - as well as to demand of - the world.

Joseph Campbell
Men sometimes confess they love war because it puts them in touch with the experience of being alive. In going to the office every day, you don't get that experience, but suddenly in war, you are ripped back into being alive. Life is pain; life is suffering; and life is horror - but, by God, you are alive.

Joseph Campbell
The Greeks, it will be recalled, regarded Eros, the god of love, as the eldest of the gods; but also as the youngest, born fresh and dewy-eyed in every living heart.

Joseph Campbell