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Joseph Campbell Quotes - Page 18

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Marriage . . . is not a love affair; it is an ordeal. (92)

Marriage . . . is not a love affair; it is an ordeal. (92)

Joseph Campbell
Inspirational, Marriage, Affair

When your mind is simply trapped by the image out there so that you never make the reference to yourself, you have misread the image.

Joseph Campbell
Understanding, Mind, Mythology
Joseph Campbell, Bill Moyers (2011). “The Power of Myth”, p.68, Anchor

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.

Joseph Campbell
Children, Flower, Men

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.

Joseph Campbell
Lying, Challenges, World

Myths are public dreams, dreams are private myths. We must be willing to get rid of the life we planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us. I have bought this wonderful machine — a computer ... it seems to me to be an Old Testament god, with a lot of rules and no mercy.

Joseph Campbell
Dream, Waiting, Machines

But the makers of legend have seldom rested content to regard the world's great heroes as mere human beings who broke past the horizons that limited their fellows and returned such boons as any man with equal faith and courage might have found.

Joseph Campbell
Inspirational, Hero, Past
Joseph Campbell (2008). “The Hero with a Thousand Faces”, p.274, New World Library

If we fix on the old, we get stuck.

Joseph Campbell
Stuck, Ifs

The usual marriage in traditional cultures was arranged for by the families. It wasn't a person-to-person decision at all. . . . In the Middle Ages, that was the kind of marriage that was sanctified by the Church. And so the troubadour idea of real person-to-person Amor was very dangerous. . . . It is in direct contradiction to the way of the Church. The word AMOR spelt backwards is ROMA, the Roman Catholic Church, which was justifying marriages that were simply political and social in their character. And so came this movement validating individual choice, what I call following your bliss.

Joseph Campbell
Real, Character, Individual Choice

All life stinks and you must embrace that with compassion.

Joseph Campbell
Inspirational, Compassion, Embrace
Joseph Campbell (2009). “Pathways to Bliss: Mythology and Personal Transformation: Easyread Large Edition”, p.130, ReadHowYouWant.com

If a person does not listen to the demands of their own spiritual and heart life and insists on a certain program, you're going to have a schizophrenic crackup. The person has put themselves off center. They have aligned themselves with a programmatic life and it's not the one the body is interested in at all.

Joseph Campbell
Spiritual, Heart, Doe

The function of ritual, as I understand it, is to give form to human life, not in the way of a mere surface arrangement, but in depth.

Joseph Campbell
Giving, Depth, Way
"Myths to Live By".

If you want to see what a society really believes in, look at what the biggest buildings on the horizon are dedicated to.

Joseph Campbell
Believe, Horizon, Looks

When you see the earth from the moon, you don't see any divisions there of nations or states. This might be the symbol, really, for the new mythology to come. That is the country that we are going to be celebrating. And those are the people that we are one with.

Joseph Campbell
Country, Moon, People
Joseph Campbell, Bill Moyers (2011). “The Power of Myth”, p.41, Anchor

We are standing on a whale fishing for minnows.

Joseph Campbell
Whales, Fishing, Minnows
Joseph Campbell, Bill Moyers (2011). “The Power of Myth”, p.46, Anchor

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
Pain, War, Live Life
Joseph Campbell, Bill Moyers (2011). “The Power of Myth”, p.141, Anchor

The rise and fall of civilizations in the long, broad course of history can be seen to have been largely a function of the integrity and cogency of their supporting canons of myth; for not authority but aspiration is the motivator, builder, and transformer of civilization.

Joseph Campbell
Inspirational, Integrity, Fall

The theme of the Grail is the bringing of life into what is known as 'the wasteland.' The wasteland is the preliminary theme to which the Grail is the answer. . . It's the world of people living inauthentic lives - doing what they are supposed to do.

Joseph Campbell
People, Answers, World

The last act in the biography of the hero is that of the death or departure.

Joseph Campbell
Hero, Departure, Biographies
Joseph Campbell (1949). “The hero with a thousand faces”

The seat of the soul is where the inner world and the outer world meet.

Joseph Campbell
Spiritual, Soul, World

The notion of this universe, its heavens, hells, and everything within it, as a great dream dreamed by a single being in which all the dream characters are dreaming too, has in India enchanted and shaped the entire civilization.

Joseph Campbell
Dream, Character, Civilization
Joseph Campbell, M. J. Abadie (1981). “The Mythic Image”, p.7, Princeton University Press

The person who thinks he has found the ultimate truth is wrong.

Joseph Campbell
Thinking, Truth Is, Found
Joseph Campbell, Bill Moyers (2011). “The Power of Myth”, p.65, Anchor

Participate joyfully in the sorrows of life

Joseph Campbell
Sorrow
Joseph Campbell (2011). “A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living”, p.9, Joseph Campbell Foundation

Now, when Luke Skywalker unmasks his father, he is taking off the machine role that the father has played. The father was the uniform. That is power, the state role.

Joseph Campbell
Inspirational, Father, Uniforms
Joseph Campbell, Bill Moyers (2011). “The Power of Myth”, p.24, Anchor

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.

Joseph Campbell
Adventure, Groups, Would Be
Joseph Campbell (1990). “The Hero's Journey: Joseph Campbell on His Life and Work”, New World Library

The unfolding through time of all things from one is the simple message, finally, of every one of the creation myths reproduced in the pages of these volumes-including that of our contemporary biological view, which becomes an effective mythic image the moment we recognize its own inner mystery. By the same magic, every god that is dead can be conjured again to life, as any fragment of rock from a hillside, set respectfully in a garden, will arrest the eye.

Joseph Campbell
Eye, Simple, Garden
Joseph Campbell (1983). “Historical Atlas of World Mythology: The way of the animal powers”, Vanderbilt Univ Department of

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