"When you are required to exhibit strength, it comes."
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Joseph Campbell quotes (page 16 of 28)
551 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"You know the rule: If you are falling, dive. Do the thing that has to be done."
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"Our true reality is in our identity and unity with all life."
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"The modern hero-deed must be that of questing to bring to light again the lost Atlantis of the co-ordinated Soul."
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"Opportunities to find deeper powers within ourselves come when life seems most challenging. Negativism to the pain and ferocity of life is negativism to life. We are not there until we can say 'yea' to it all."
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"Dragons, you know, we have a good deal of biology and zoology about the dragon; we know their habits. The dragon tends to guard things, and he usually has these guarded in a cave... Now dragons don't know what to do either with beautiful girls or gold, but they just hang on. There are people like this. We call them creeps."
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"Awe is what moves us forward."
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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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"Eternity is not the hereafter...this is it. If you don't get it here you won't get it anywhere."
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"You know, I didn't write my books for critics and scholars. I wrote them for students and artists. When I hear how much my work has meant to them--well, I can't tell you how happy that makes me. That means that this great stuff of myth, which I have been so privileged to work with, will be kept alive for a whole new generation. That's the function of the artists, you know, to reinterpret the old stories and make them come alive again, in poetry, painting, and now in movies."
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"The function of the artist is the mythologization of the culture and the world. In the visual arts there were two men whose work handled mythological themes in a marvelous way: Paul Klee and Pablo Picasso."
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"Mythology is not a lie, mythology is poetry, it is metaphorical. It has been well said that mythology is the penultimate truth--penultimate because the ultimate cannot be put into words. It is beyond words. Beyond images, beyond that bounding rim of the Buddhist Wheel of Becoming. Mythology pitches the mind beyond that rim, to what can be known but not told."
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"The usual hero adventure begins with someone from whom something has been taken, or who feels there is something lacking in the normal experience available or permitted to the members of society. The person then takes off on a series of adventures beyond the ordinary, either to recover what has been lost or to discover some life-giving elixir. It's usually a cycle, a coming and a returning."
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"The myth is the public domain and the dream is the private myth. If your private myth, your dream, happens to coincide with that of the society, you are in good accord with your group. If it isn't, you've got a long adventure in the dark forest ahead of you."
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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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"Mythology tells us that where you stumble, there your treasure is ... The world is a match for us, and we’re a match for the world. And where it seems most challenging lies the greatest invitation to find deeper and greater power in ourselves."
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"In the older view the goddess Universe was alive, herself organically the Earth, the horizon, and the heavens. Now she is dead, and the universe is not an organism, but a building, with gods at rest in it in luxury: not as personifications of the energies in their manners of operation, but as luxury tenants, requiring service. And Man, accordingly, is not as a child born to flower in the knowledge of his own eternal portion but as a robot fashioned to serve."
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"A schism in the body social, will not be resolved by any scheme of a return to the good old days (archaism), or by programs guaranteed to render an ideal projected future (futurism), or even by the most realistic, hardheaded work to weld together again the deteriorating elements. Only birth can conquer death -- the birth, not of the old thing again, but of something new."
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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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"They thought that it would be a disgrace to go forth as a group. Each entered the forest at a point that he himself had chosen, where it was darkest and there was no path. If there is a path it is someone else's path and you are not on the adventure."
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