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"How does the ordinary person come to the transcendent? For a start, I would say, study poetry. Learn how to read a poem. You need not have the experience to get the message, or at least some indication of the message. It may come gradually."
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"Photograph: a picture painted by the sun without instruction in art."

"The capacity to be puzzled is the premise of all creation, be it in art or in science."

"I see my life in terms of music."

"Logic: The art of thinking and reasoning in strict accordance with the limitations and incapacities of the human misunderstanding."

"It is impossible to give a clear account of the world, but art can teach us to reproduce it-just as the world reproduces itself in the course of its eternal gyrations. The primordial sea indefatigably repeats the same words and casts up the same astonished beings on the same sea-shore."

"The crushed teapot in the rubbish of the bulldozed house will sing in your ears forever."

"The essence of all beautiful art, all great art, is gratitude."
Explore more quotes by Joseph Campbell

"Dream is the personalized myth, myth the depersonalized dream; both myth and dream are symbolic in the same general way of the dynamic of the psyche. But in the dream the forms are quirked by the peculiar troubles of the dreamer, whereas in myth the problems and solutions sown are directly valid for all mankind."

"You can get a lot of work done if you stay with it and are excited and its play instead of work."

"The Garden is a metaphor for the following: our minds, and our thinking in terms of pairs of opposites--man and woman, good and evil--are as holy as that of a god."

"If you do follow your bliss you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. Follow your bliss and don't be afraid, and doors will open where you didn't know they were going to be."

"When you are on your path, and it is truly your path, doors will open for you where there were no doors for someone else."

"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."

"The goal of life is to make your heartbeat match the beat of the universe, to match your nature with Nature."

"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."

"Comedies, in the ancient world, were regarded as of a higher rank than tragedy, of a deeper truth, of a more difficult realization, of a sounder structure, and of a revelation more complete. The happy ending of the fairy tale, the myth, and the divine comedy of the soul, is to be read, not as a contradiction, but as a transcendence of the universal tragedy of man.... Tragedy is the shattering of the forms and of our attachments to the forms; comedy, the wild and careless, inexhaustible joy of life invincible."

"I think the person who takes a job in order to live - that is to say, for the money - has turned himself into a slave."
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