Gods suppressed become devils, and often it is these devils whom we first encounter when we turn inward.
JOSEPH CAMPBELLThe best things cannot be told, the second best are misunderstood. After that comes civilized conversation; after that, mass indoctrination; after that, intercultural exchange.
More Joseph Campbell Quotes
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Where you stumble and fall, there you will find gold.
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Nothing can happen to you that is not positive. Even though it looks and feels at the moment like a negative crisis, it is not. The crisis throws you back, and when you are required to exhibit strength, it comes.
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No one in the world was ever you before, with your particular gifts and abilities and possibilities.
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You can’t have creativity unless you leave behind the bounded, the fixed, all the rules
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I have found that you have only to take that one step toward the gods, and they will then take ten steps toward you. That step, the heroic first step of the journey, is out of, or over the edge of, your boundaries, and it often must be taken before you know that you will.
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Whatever the hell happens, say, ‘This is what I need.’
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How do you find the divine power in yourself? The word enthusiasm means ‘filled with a god,’ so what makes you enthusiastic? Follow it. So I have a little word: follow your bliss. The bliss is the message of God to yourself. That’s where your life is.
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I think of compassion as the fundamental religious experience and, unless that is there, you have nothing.
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I always tell my students, go where your body and soul want to go. When you have the feeling, then stay with it, and don’t let anyone throw you off.
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The purpose of the journey is compassion. When you have come past the pairs of opposites, you have reached compassion.
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God is a metaphor for that which transcends all levels of intellectual thought. It’s as simple as that.
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Both the artist and the lover know that perfection is not loveable. It is the clumsiness of a fault that makes a person lovable.
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The psychotic drowns in the same waters in which the mystic swims with delight.
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If you are on the right path you will find that invisible hands are helping.
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Suddenly you’re ripped into being alive. And life is pain, and life is suffering, and life is horror, but my god you’re alive and its spectacular.
JOSEPH CAMPBELL