"What the artist must render is a living moment somehow, a living moment actually in action or an inward experience."
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Quote collection
Joseph Campbell quotes (page 23 of 28)
551 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"The passage of the mythological hero may be over ground, incidentally; fundamentally it is inward--into depths where obscure resistances are overcome, and long lost, forgotten powers are revivified, to be made available for the transfiguration of the world."
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"The person who thinks he has found the ultimate truth is wrong."
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"So I think the Guru can be a delusion. But everything can be deluding. The thing central about the Guru in the West is that he represents an alien principle of the spirit, namely, that you don't follow your own path; you follow a given path. And that's totaly contrary to the Western Spirit! Our spirituality is of the individual quest, individual realization- authenticity in your life out of your own center. So you must take the message of the East, assimilate it to your own dimension and to your own thrust of life, and not get pulled off track."
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"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."
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"We're all seeking...the rapture of being alive."
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"[M]yths are not invented as stories are. Myths are inspired-they really are. They come from the same realm that dream comes from."
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"Behind all these manifestations is the one radiance, which shines through all things."
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"The best we can do is lean towards the light."
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"Any god who can invent hell is no candidate for the Salvation Army"
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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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"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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"First you must find your trajectory, and then comes the social coordination."
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"Society has provided [children] no rituals by which they become members of the tribe, of the community. All children need to be twice born, to learn to function rationally in the present world, leaving childhood behind."
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"If you realize what the real problem is-losing yourself-you realize that this itself is the ultimate trial."
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"We know that Jesus could not have ascended to heaven because there is no physical heaven anywhere in the universe. Even ascending at the speed of light, Jesus would still be in the galaxy."
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"I think of mythology as a function of biology; the energies of the body are the energies that move the imagination. These energies are the source, then, of mythological imagery; in a mythological organization of symbols, the conflicts between the different organic impulses within the body are resolved and harmonized. You might say mythology is a formula for the harmonization of the energies of life."
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"Participate joyfully in the sorrows of life"
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"With the moon walk, the religious myth that sustained these notions could no longer be held. With our view of earthrise, we could see that the earth and the heavens were no longer divided but that the earth is in the heavens. (105)"
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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."
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