Popular quotes about Myth! Wisdom and inspiration are here!
There is a sad myth going around today - the myth of neutrality. According to this myth, the secular world gives every point of view an equal chance to be heard. And it works fairly well - unless you are a Christian.
Francis SchaefferMyth is the practical metabolism of our soulish life, the logic of our obsessions and oversights for which we have no language or code. Myth is the "morality" that the ineffable puts upon us, our unaccountable imperatives, our inexplicably selective clarity and obscurity, the mortal one-sidedness of our talents and wits, the passion and apathy that make such a transient passage through our hapless minds; that weave a pattern of fatality others will see before we do. Myth is distinctively human or sublime higher-order instinct, the "reason" in culture that reason knows not of.
Kenny SmithNow that Scotty has entered the realm of myth, everyone wants to own him. And maybe they should. Doesn't a myth belong to everyone?
Jennifer EganThe whole thing died in my mind long before the rumpus started. We used to believe the Beatles myth just as much as the public and we were in love with them just the same way. But we were four individuals who eventually recovered our individualities after being submerged in a myth.
John LennonIt helps to regard soul as an active intelligence, forming and plotting each person's fate. Translators use "plot" to render the ancient Greek word mythos in English. The plots that entangle our souls and draw forth our characters are the great myths. That is why we need a sense of myth and knowledge of different myths to gain insight into our epic struggles, our misalliances, and our tragedies. Myths show the imaginative structures inside our messes, and our human characters can locate themselves against the background of the characters of myth.
James HillmanAdmixing the inner space of dream, trance, and myth with the events of everyday existence characterized every belief system worldwide before the Greeks.....time meandered back and forth between reality and myth.
Leonard ShlainFreud was one of the greatest influences on me. He made myth into psychiatry, and I've been trying to turn it back into myth again.
Ross MacdonaldThe great wheel of fire of ancient wisdom, silence and word engendering the myth of the origin, human action engendering the epic voyage toward the other; historical violence revealing the tragic flaw of the hero who must then return to the land of origin; myth of death and renewal and silence from which new words and images will arise, keeps on turning in spite of the blindness of purely lineal thought.
Carlos FuentesThere is nothing truer than myth: history, in its attempt to realize myth, distorts it, stops halfway; when history claims to have succeeded, this is nothing but humbug and mystification. Everything we dream is realizable. Reality does not have to be: it is simply what it is.
Eugene IonescoThere's a longstanding myth about the United States that is still very prevalent in Europe [despite recent developments]. Historically the "America" of this myth is an incredible human adventure and an experiment in political democracy. But at the same time, or so we're told, it's the land of extremes where the worst can happen.
Bruno DumontA too often forgotten truth is that you can live through actual events of history and completely miss the underlying reality of what's going. What history misses, the myth clearly expresses. The myth in the hands of a genius give us a clear picture of the inner import of life itself.
Tom Harpur[P]rescientific people... could never guess the nature of physical reality beyond the tiny sphere attainable by unaided common sense. Nothing else ever worked, no exercise from myth, revelation, art, trance, or any other conceivable means; and notwithstanding the emotional satisfaction it gives, mysticism, the strongest prescientific probe in the unknown, has yielded zero.
E. O. WilsonI began to pick apart our knowledge of Frankenstein and discovered that the public's idea of this myth comes from a million different places... I became committed to recontextualizing it all so it all worked in one story.
Max LandisTo idolise a person means you don't get to know them, and the idea that you can become one is a myth, and it also means that you don't need to talk to one another because you're the same person.
Theodore ZeldinThe Gods and Goddesses of myth, legend and fairy tale represent archetypes, real potencies and potentialities deep within the psyche, which, when allowed to flower permit us to be more fully human.
Margot AdlerIt is a myth that man in his natural state is genuinely seeking God. Men do seek God. But they do not seek him for who he is. They seek him in a pinch as one who might preserve them from death or enhance their worldly enjoyments. Apart from conversion, no one comes to the light of God.
John PiperThings we are accustomed to regard as myth or fairy story are very much present in people's lives. Nice people behave like wicked stepmothers. Every day.
Diana Wynne JonesWhen I was younger, I was fascinated by David Bowie, for example. he had created an entire myth around himself. It was as important as his music.
Lars von TrierThere is a segment of the American population that has been excluded from the national myth, and that should be redressed.
Edward ZwickThe act of abortion positions women at their most powerful, and that is why it is so strongly opposed by many in society. Historically viewed as and conditioned to be passive, dependent creatures, victims of biological circumstance, women often find it difficult to embrace this power over life and death. They fall prey to the assumption, the myth, that they cannot be trusted with it.
Merle HoffmanOpening a play is just tough. The idea that actors are weirdly protected from it is a myth. If you imagine yourself having to spend two and a bit hours cooking bolognaise, remembering a whole major work by David Hare and speaking it at the correct moment between chopping carrots and stirring the onions in front of an audience - the normal human response is 'Please, can I go to the airport?'
Bill NighyOne may call the world a myth , in which bodies and things are visible, but souls and minds hidden. Besides, to wish to teach the whole truth about the Gods to all produces contempt in the foolish, because they cannot understand, and lack of zeal in the good, whereas to conceal the truth by myths prevents the contempt of the foolish, and compels the good to practice philosophy.
SallustThe images of Myth are reflections of Spiritual and Depth potentialities of every one of us. Through contemplating those we evoke those powers in our own lives to operate through ourselves.
Joseph CampbellI think the Sixties in some ways is a barrier to young people today. They think of it, you know, what we're doing is not that. But it's partly the myth of the Sixties. It always felt embattled and small. It always, almost always, was a small group of people relative to the opposition around.
Bernardine DohrnIf we want liberation, we must rewrite the Sleeping Beauty myth. No one is coming and no one else is to blame.
Elizabeth LesserMyth and poetry represent a reservoir of vertical thinking, which we could also call longing and gratitude to ancestors. We need that gratitude desperately.
Robert BlyWhen the war (WWI) finally ended it was necessary for both sides to maintain, indeed even to inflate, the myth of sacrifice so that the whole affair would not be seen for what it was: a meaningless waste of millions of lives. Logically, if the flower of youth had been cut down in Flanders, the survivors were not the flower: the dead were superior to the traumatized living. In this way, the virtual destruction of a generation further increased the distance between the old and the young, between the official and the unofficial.
Robert HughesI make my share of mistakes, but one I never make is to underestimate the power of things. People imbued from childhood with the myth of the primacy of feeling seldom like to admit they really want things as much as they might want love, but my career has convinced me that plenty of them do. And some want things a lot worse than they want love.
Larry McMurtryCapitalismโs grow-or-die imperative stands radically at odds with ecologyโs imperative of interdependence and limit. The two imperatives can no longer coexist with each other; nor can any society founded on the myth that they can be reconciled hope to survive. Either we will establish an ecological society or society will go under for everyone, irrespective of his or her status.
Ursula K. Le GuinMy child, you have a flawed grasp of the nature of myth-making. I am a poet and storyteller, a creator of ballads and sagas. Pray do not confuse the exercise of the imagination with mere mendacity. I am a master of the mysteries of words, their meanings and music and mellifluous magic.
Frances HardingeAs every past generation has had to disenthrall itself from an inheritance of truisms and stereotypes, so in our own time we must move on from the reassuring repetition of stale phrases to a new, difficult, but essential confrontation with reality. For the great enemy of truth is very often not the lie-deliberate, contrived and dishonest-but the myth-persistent, persuasive and unrealistic. Mythology distracts us everywhere.
John F. KennedyThe person who experiences greatness must have a feeling for the myth he is in. He must reflect what is projected upon him. And he must have a strong sense of the sardonic. This is what uncouples him from belief in his own pretensions. The sardonic is all that permits him to move within himself. Without this quality, even occasional greatness will destroy a man.
Frank HerbertI always looked for a man to rescue me and bring me happiness. I bought into that myth, of course, and looked for my own Prince Charming.
Linda Evansthe unconscious of an artist is her greatest treasure. It is what transmutes the dross of autobiography into the gold of myth.
Erica JongRationalism belongs to the cool observer. But because of the stupidity of the average person, they follow not reason, but faith. This naรฏve faith, requires necessary illusions and emotionally potent oversimplifications, which are provided by the myth maker to keep the ordinary person on course.
Reinhold NiebuhrThe idea of eternal return is a mysterious one, and Nietzsche has often perplexed other philosophers with it: to think that everything recurs as we once experienced it, and that the recurrence itself recurs ad infinitum! What does this mad myth signify?
Milan KunderaIn practice, US officials seem to know better than to indulge in the patriotic myth that our constitution is the greatest system of government ever devised.
Matthew YglesiasMyth is much more important and true than history. History is just journalism and you know how reliable that is.
Joseph CampbellIf the majority of the "spiritual market" is drawn to prerational magic and myth, how do you reach the small group who are involved in genuine, laborious, demanding, transrational spiritual practice? This is very difficult, because both markets are referred to as "spiritual," but these two camps really don't get along very well-one is mostly translative, the other is mostly transformative, and they generally disapprove of each other-so how do you put them into one magazine without alienating them both?
Ken Wilber