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Quotes About Life

When you have lived your individual life in your own adventurous way and then look back upon its course, you will find that you have lived a model human life, after all.
~ Joseph Campbell
among the Aztecs, for example, who had a number of heavens to which people's souls would be assigned according to the conditions of their death, the heaven for warriors killed in battle was the same for mothers who died in childbirth. Giving birth is definitely a heroic deed, in that it is the giving over of oneself to the life of another.
~ Joseph Campbell
There is an important idea in Nietzsche, of Amor fati , the love of your fate, which is in fact your life. As he says, if you say no to a single factor in your life, you have unravelled the whole thing. Furthermore, the more challenging or threatening the situation or context to be assimilated and affirmed, the greater the stature of the person who can achieve it. The demon you can swallow gives you its power, and the greater life's pain, the greater life's reply.
~ Joseph Campbell
God is within you! You yourself are the creator. If you find that place within you from which you brought this thing about, you will be able to live with it and affirm it, perhaps even enjoy it, as your life.
~ Joseph Campbell
Heresy is the life of a mythology and orthodoxy is the death.
~ Joseph Campbell
In marriage you are not sacrificing yourself to the other person. You are sacrificing yourself to the relationship. You become mature when you become the authority of your own life. Life will always be sorrowful. We can't change it, but we can change our attitude toward it. Awe is what moves us forward.
~ Joseph Campbell
I will participate in the game. It is a wonderful, wonderful opera – except that it hurts.
~ Joseph Campbell
It is a basic idea of practically every war mythology that the enemy is a monster and that in killing him one is protecting the only truly valuable order of human life on earth, which is that, of course, of one's own people.
~ Joseph Campbell
The spirit is the bouquet of nature.
~ Joseph Campbell
Thinking in mythological terms helps to put you in accord with the inevitables of this vale of tears. You learn to recognize the positive values in what appear to be the negative moments and aspects of your life. The big question is whether you are going to be able to say a hearty yes to your adventure.
~ Joseph Campbell
Vegetarianism is the first turning away from life, because life lives on lives. Vegetarians are just eating something that can't run away.
~ Joseph Campbell
Life is, in its very essence and character, a terrible mystery—this whole business of living by killing and eating. But it is a childish attitude to say no to life with all its pain, to say that this is something that should not have been.
~ Joseph Campbell
anyone continually knitting his life into contexts of intention, import, and clarifications of meaning will in the end find that he has lost the sense of experiencing life.
~ Joseph Campbell
The distance of your love is the distance of your life.   Love is exactly as strong as life.
~ Joseph Campbell
It's important to live life with the experience, and therefore the knowledge, of its mystery and of your own mystery. This gives life a new radiance, a new harmony, a new splendor.
~ Joseph Campbell
The contemplation of the life thus should be undertaken as a meditation on one's own immanent divinity, not as a prelude to precise imitation, the lesson being, not "Do thus and be good," but "Know this and be God.
~ Joseph Campbell
Mythology is to relate found truth to the living of a life.
~ Joseph Campbell
Joseph Campbell affirmed life as adventure. "To hell with it," he said, after his university adviser tried to hold him to a narrow academic curriculum. He gave up on the pursuit of a doctorate and went instead into the woods to read. He continued all his life to read books about the world: anthropology, biology, philosophy, art, history, religion. And he continued to remind others that one sure path into the world runs along the printed page.
~ Joseph Campbell
People often think of the Goddess as a fertility deity only. Not at all—she's the muse. She's the inspirer of poetry. She's the inspirer of the spirit. So, she has three functions: one, to give us life; two, to be the one who receives us in death; and three, to inspire our spiritual, poetic realization.
~ Joseph Campbell
He has yet to confront society with this ego-shattering, life-redeeming elixir, and take the return blow of reasonable queries, hard resentment, and good people at a loss to comprehend.
~ Joseph Campbell
CAMPBELL: You yourself are participating in the evil, or you are not alive. Whatever you do is evil for somebody. This is one of the ironies of the whole creation.
~ Joseph Campbell
But marriage is marriage, you know. Marriage is not a love affair. A love affair is a totally different thing. A marriage is a commitment to that which you are. That person is literally your other half. And you and the other are one. A love affair isn't that. That is a relationship for pleasure, and when it gets to be unpleasurable, its off. But a marriage is a life commitment, and a life commitment means the prime concern of your life. If marriage is not the prime concern, you're not married.
~ Joseph Campbell
The relationship of these two gods is important: Hermes guides souls to the knowledge of eternal life by way of intellectual initiation, while Dionysus represents sudden inspiration, the energy of life pouring through time and throwing off old forms to make new life.
~ Joseph Campbell
lies are what the world lives on, and those who can face the challenge of a truth and build their lives to accord are finally not many, but the very few.
~ Joseph Campbell