A Quote by Joseph Campbell

The myths and folk tales of the whole world make clear that the refusal is essentially a refusal to give up what one takes to be one's own interest. The future is regarded not in terms of an unremitting series of deaths and births, but as though one's present system of ideals, virtues, goals, and advantages were to be fixed and made secure.

Joseph Campbell

Quote Topics

Advantages Clear Deaths Essentially Fixed Folk Future Give Goals Ideals Interest Made Make Myths Own Present Refusal Regarded Secure Series System Takes Tales Terms Though Up Virtues Were Whole Whole World World

Quote Author

Joseph Campbell
American - Author
March 26, 1904 - October 31, 1987

REFUSAL, n. Denial of something desired; Refusals are graded in a descending scale of finality thus: the refusal absolute, the refusal condition, the refusal tentative and the refusal feminine. The last is called by some casuists the refusal assentive.

Ambrose Bierce

Myths, as compared with folk tales, are usually in a special category of seriousness: they are believed to have "really happened,"or to have some exceptional significance in explaining certain features of life, such as ritual. Again, whereas folk tales simply interchange motifs and develop variants, myths show an odd tendency to stick together and build up bigger structures. We have creation myths, fall and flood myths, metamorphose and dying-god myths.

Northrop Frye

Sin is a refusal to grow, a refusal to love, a refusal to get committed, to be concerned, and to take risks.

Anthony de Mello

When I came to the last line of 'Car Crash While Hitchhiking,' I read it as a pitiless statement of indifference: a refusal to warn the family of their impending collision, a refusal to help when miraculously spared, a refusal to act on the empathy hiding behind the story's language.

Anthony Marra

Also, perhaps children are sterner than grown-up people in their refusal to suffer, in their refusal, even, to feel at all.

Elizabeth Bowen

We can't give our children the future, strive though we may to make it secure. But we can give them the present.

Kathleen Norris

Ah well, 'tis the way of the world -- births and deaths, births and deaths.

Leonid Andreyev

My own feeling is that one should refuse to participate in any activity that implements American aggression - thus tax refusal, draft refusal, avoidance of work that can be used by the agencies of militarism and repression, all seem to me essential.

Noam Chomsky

Not only is suicide a sin, it is the sin. It is the ultimate and absolute evil, the refusal to take an interest in existence; the refusal to take the oath of loyalty to life. The man who kills a man, kills a man. The man who kills himself, kills all men. As far as he is concerned he wipes out the world.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

These are the four abuses: desire to succeed in order to make oneself famous; taking credit for the labors of others; refusal to correct one's errors despite advice; refusal to change one's ideas despite warnings.

Confucius

Over the centuries we have transformed the ancient myths and folk tales and made them into the fabric of our lives. Consciously and unconsciously we weave the narratives of myth and folk tale into our daily existence.

Jack Zipes

In some circumstances, the refusal to be defeated is a refusal to be educated.

Margaret Halsey

There is the refusal of style and the refusal of sentimentalism, there is this desire for clarity.

Luc Delahaye

Any refusal to recognize reality, for any reason whatever, has disastrous consequences. There are no evil thoughts except one: the refusal to think. Don't ignore your own desires.... Don't sacrifice them. Examine their cause. There is a limit to how much you should have to bear.

Ayn Rand

The southern colonists were not preoccupied with their own historical significance and mostly did not bother even to make the records of births, marriages, and deaths that they required of themselves by law. Nor did they write accounts of what they were up to for the benefit of posterity.