The collection / 151 fragments

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Passages, proverbs, and questions carried across the ages.

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151 results · Page 2 of 7Play this collection ▷

01c. 1945 AD

Writer’s block results from too much head. Cut off your head. Pegasus, poetry, was born of Medusa when her head was cut off. You have to be reckless when writing. Be as crazy as your conscience allows.

Joseph Campbell / quote

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02c. 1945 AD

Follow your bliss and doors will open where there were no doors before.

Joseph Campbell / quote

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03c. 1945 AD

All religions are true but none are literal.

Joseph Campbell / quote

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04c. 1945 AD

Half the people in the world think that the metaphors of their religious traditions, for example, are facts. And the other half contends that they are not facts at all. As a result we have people who consider themselves believers because they accept metaphors as facts, and we have others who classify themselves as atheists because they think religious metaphors are lies.

Joseph Campbell / quote

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05c. 1945 AD

Every religion is true one way or another. It is true when understood metaphorically. But when it gets stuck in its own metaphors, interpreting them as facts, then you are in trouble.

Joseph Campbell / quote

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06c. 1945 AD

Myth is what we call other people's religion.

Joseph Campbell / quote

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07c. 1945 AD

There seem to be only two kinds of people: Those who think that metaphors are facts, and those who know that they are not facts. Those who know they are not facts are what we call "atheists," and those who think they are facts are "religious." Which group really gets the message?

Joseph Campbell / quote

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08c. 1945 AD

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)

Joseph Campbell / quote

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09c. 1945 AD

Mythology may, in a real sense, be defined as other people's religion. And religion may, in a sense, be understood as popular misunderstanding of mythology. (8)

Joseph Campbell / quote

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10c. 1945 AD

Heresy is the life of a mythology and orthodoxy is the death.

Joseph Campbell / quote

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11c. 1945 AD

The job of an educator is to teach students to see vitality in themselves

Joseph Campbell / quote

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12c. 1945 AD

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 / quote

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13c. 1945 AD

The problem in our society and in our schools is to inclulcate, without overdoing it, the notion of education, as in the Latin educere--to lead, to bring out what is in someone rather than merely to indoctrinate him/her from the outside. (89)

Joseph Campbell / quote

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14c. 1945 AD

When you translate the Bible with excessive literalism, you demythologize it. The possibility of a convincing reference to the individual's own spiritual experience is lost. (111)

Joseph Campbell / quote

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15c. 1945 AD

The images of Myth are reflections of Spiritual and Depth potentialities of every one of us. Through contemplating those we evoke those powers in our own lives to operate through ourselves.

Joseph Campbell / quote

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16c. 1945 AD

Mythology is composed by poets out of their insights and realizations. Mythologies are not invented they are found. You can no more tell us what your dream is going to be tonight than we can invent a myth. Myths come from the mystical region of essential experience.

Joseph Campbell / quote

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17c. 1945 AD

The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.

Joseph Campbell / quote

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18c. 1945 AD

[T]he experience of mystery comes not from expecting it but through yielding all your programs, because your programs are based on fear and desire. Drop them and the radiance comes. (16)

Joseph Campbell / quote

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19c. 1945 AD

Shakespeare said that art is a mirror held up to nature. And that’s what it is. The nature is your nature, and all of these wonderful poetic images of mythology are referring to something in you. When your mind is trapped by the image out there so that you never make the reference to yourself, you have misread the image.The inner world is the world of your requirements and your energies and your structure and your possibilities that meets the outer world. And the outer world is the field of your incarnation. That’s where you are. You’ve got to keep both going. As Novalis said, 'The seat of the soul is there where the inner and outer worlds meet.

Joseph Campbell / quote

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20c. 1945 AD

The dreamer is a distinguished operatic artist, and, like all who have elected to follow, not the safely marked general highways of the day, but the adventure of the special, dimly audiblecall that comes to those whose ears are open within as well as without

Joseph Campbell / quote

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21c. 1945 AD

We're in a free fall into the future. We don't know where we're going. Things are changing so fast. And always when you're going through a long tunnel, anxiety comes along. But all you have to do to transform your hell into a paradise is to turn your fall into a voluntary act. It's a very interesting shift of perspective . . . Joyfully participate in the sorrows of the world and everything changes.

Joseph Campbell / quote

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22c. 1945 AD

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 / quote

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23c. 1945 AD

If you want to change the world, change the metaphor.

Joseph Campbell / quote

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24c. 1945 AD

A bit of adviceGiven to a young Native AmericanAt 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 / quote

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