The Hero with a Thousand Faces
Joseph Campbell
Top 10 Best Quotes
“Regrets are illuminations come too late.”
“The agony of breaking through personal limitations is the agony of spiritual growth. Art, literature, myth and cult, philosophy, and ascetic disciplines are instruments to help the individual past his limiting horizons into spheres of ever-expanding realization. As he crosses threshold after threshold, conquering dragon after dragon, the stature of the divinity that he summons to his highest wish increases, until it subsumes the cosmos. Finally, the mind breaks the bounding sphere of the cosmos to a realization transcending all experiences of form - all symbolizations, all divinities: a realization of the ineluctable void.”
“Not all who hesitate are lost. The psyche has many secrets in reserve. And these are not disclosed unless required.”
“Perhaps some of us have to go through dark and devious ways before we can find the river of peace or the highroad to the soul's destination.”
“Wherever the poetry of myth is interpreted as biography, history, or science, it is killed.”
“The usual hero adventure begins with someone from whom something has been taken, or who feels there is something lacking in the normal experience available or permitted to the members of society. The person then takes off on a series of adventures beyond the ordinary, either to recover what has been lost or to discover some life-giving elixir. It's usually a cycle, a coming and a returning.”
“It is only when a man tames his own demons that he becomes the king of himself if not of the world.”
“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”
“The hero of yesterday becomes the tyrant of tomorrow, unless he crucifies himself today.”
“Modern romance, like Greek tragedy, celebrates the mystery of dismemberment, which is life in time. The happy ending is justly scorned as a misrepresentation; for the world, as we know it, as we have seen it, yields but one ending: death, disintegration, dismemberment, and the crucifixion of our heart with the passing of the forms that we have loved.”
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Book Keywords:
tame, man, death, love, courage, tragedy, control, life, kind, dream, monomyth, myth, demons, art