Quotes About Myth

In the New Testament, myth stands over against the truth of the history of Jesus Christ ... the decisive die has ... been already cast in the New Testament opposition to myth.

Myth, legend, and ritual ... function to maintain a status quo. That makes them singularly bad in coping with change, indeed counterproductive, for change is the enemy of myth.

Myths are about the human struggle to deal with the great passages of time and life--birth, death, marriage, the transitions from childhood to adulthood to old age. They meet a need in the psychological or spiritual nature of humans that has absolutely nothing to do with science. To try to turn a myth into a science, or a science into a myth, is an insult to myths, an insult to religion, and an insult to science. In attempting to do this, creationists have missed the significance, meaning, and sublime nature of myths. They took a beautiful story of creation and re-creation and ruined it.

A myth is an old lie that people believe in. White people believe that they're better than anyone else on earth - and that's a myth.

It 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.

It is not without fear and trembling that a historian of religion approaches the problem of myth. This is not only because of that preliminary embarrassing question: what is intended by myth? It is also because the answers given depend for the most part on the documents selected.

The foundation of morality should not be made dependent on myth nor tied to any authority lest doubt about the myth or about the legitimacy of the authority imperil the foundation of sound judgment and action.

There'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.

Maybe this is all a bit of a myth, a willful desire to give each place its own unique aura. But doesn't any collective belief eventually become a kind of truth? If enough people act as if something is true, isn't it indeed "true," not objectively, but in the sense that it will determine how they will behave? The myth of unique urban character and unique sensibilities in different cities exists because we want it to exist.

The reason I wouldn't dare to write a Western is simply because that seems to be so much a part of American culture. Maybe if I want to write a Western enough I should try to overcome that fear, but I'll certainly feel like I'm trespassing. I feel that that is so much a part of American foundation myth, it's part of the myth of America, the American vision of what America is, which people have glorified and then challenged and then vilified.

Greatness is a transitory experience. It is never consistent. It depends in part upon the myth-making imagination of humankind. The person who experiences greatness must have a feeling for the myth he or she is in. That person must reflect what is projected upon him or her.

There were two forests for every one you entered. There was the one you walked in, the physical echo, and then there was the one that was connected to all the other forests, with no consideration of distance, or time. The forest primeval, remembered through the collective memory of every tree in the same way that people remembered myth- through the collective subconscious that Jung mapped, the shared mythic resonance that lay buried in every human mind. Legend and myth, all tangled in an alphabet of trees remembered, not always with understanding, but with wonder. With awe.

The widely accepted assertion that, only if you let markets be will everyone be paid correctly and thus fairly, according to his worth, is a myth. Only when we part with this myth and grasp the political nature of the market and the collective nature of individual productivity will we be able to build a more just society in which historical legacies and collective actions, and not just individual talents and efforts, are properly taken into account in deciding how to reward people.

The myth is a surviving fragment of the psychic life of the infancy of the race whilst the dream is the myth of the individual.

Writer's block is a myth. I never see the gardeners suffering from gardening block.

Nowhere was Darwin able to point to one bona fide case of natural selection having actually generated evolutionary change in nature....Ultimately, the Darwinian theory of evolution is no more nor less than the great cosmogenic myth of the twentieth century.

Before I came along, my field was dominated by myth, superstition, deceit, and outright fraud. I overcame it by the simple application of logical thinking.

Life balance is a myth. It's an illusion and the very pursuit of it is driving us crazy. For me it's about proportion - it's really a work hard/play hard equation.

Now is the time to become a myth.

Trickle-down economics is a myth. Enriching corporations - as the TPP would - will not necessarily help those in the middle, let alone those at the bottom.

The increasing communalization of Indian politics is a juggernaut that annihilates the myth of secularism in India.

Most people live in a myth and grow violently angry if anyone dares to tell them the truth about themselves.

We have deluded ourselves into believing the myth that capitalism grew and prospered out of the Protestant ethic of hard work and sacrifices. Capitalism was built on the exploitation of black slaves and continues to thrive on the exploitation of the poor, both black and white, both here and abroad.

The second thing that happened is, DNA analysis is much more sophisticated. All you have to do now is spit in a test tube and you find out all kind of things in six weeks - where they are from in Africa or Europe. You can prove or disprove the fundamental African-American myth that you descended from a Cherokee great, great grandmother.

Thanks to the discoveries of astronomers in the twentieth century, we now know that the heat death is a myth. The heat death can never happen, and there is no paradox.

As a guiding principle I believe that every poem must be its own sole freshly created universe, and therefore have no belief n 'tradition' or a common myth-kitty or casual allusions in poems to other poems or poets, which last I find unpleasantly like the talk of literary understrappers letting you see they know the right people.

It is a myth that the success of science in our time is mainly due to the huge amounts of money that have been spent on big machines. What really makes science grow is new ideas, including false ideas.

The only thing they [government] want is better data. But data doesn't tell people someone is well educated. It's a vicious circle. There is some myth involved. Some of this attitude has a long history.

Today a new faith is awakening — the Myth of the blood; the belief that to defend the blood is also to defend the divine nature of man in general. It is a belief, effulgent with the brightest knowledge, that Nordic blood represents that Mysterium which has overcome and replaced the older sacraments.

I look at the story, I look at the idea and just try to think of it in terms of that whole body of myth and see where the characters fit in and what they ought to be doing-all those archetypes are there to play with.

Science and technology revolutionize our lives, but memory, tradition and myth frame our response.

Our society does reward beauty on the outside over health on the inside. Women must not be blamed for choosing short-term beauty "fixes" that harm our long-term health, since our life spans are inverted under the beauty myth, and there is no great social or economic incentive for women to live a long time.

I 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.

the unconscious of an artist is her greatest treasure. It is what transmutes the dross of autobiography into the gold of myth.

The ugly duckling is a misunderstood universal myth. It's not about turning into a blonde Barbie doll or becoming what you dream of being; it's about self-revelation, becoming who you are.

The myth that men are the economic providers and women, mainly, are mothers and care givers in the family has now been thoroughly refuted. This family pattern has never been the norm, except in a narrow middle-class segment.

I absolutely believe the past had its share of warrior women who fought like men. Whether some of these were the actual Amazons from Greek myth is another matter.

Wolves don't hunt singly, but always in pairs. The lone wolf was a myth.

If this country [America] is to survive, the best-fed-nation myth had better be recognized for what it is: propaganda designed to produce wealth not health.

The myth of unending consumption has taken the place of the belief in life everlasting.

We need to stop buying into the myth about gender equality. It isn't a reality yet. Today, women make up half of the U.S. workforce, but the average working woman earns only 77 percent of what the average working man makes. But unless women and men both say this is unacceptable, things will not change.

[Kafka] transformed the profoundly antipoetic material of a highly bureaucratized society into the great poetry of the novel; he transformed a very ordinary story of a man who cannot obtain a promised job . . . into myth, into epic, into a kind of beauty never before seen.

I always thought what if you took a myth of childhood like the tooth fairy and made it a central scary thing. We did it on Hellboy and we did it on 'Don't be afraid of the dark'.

There can be no stronger proof of the impoverishment of our contemporary culture than the popular - though profoundly mistaken - definition of myth as falsehood.

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.

Spokespeople sell women the Iron Maiden and name her "Health": if public discourse were really concerned with women's health, it would turn angrily upon this aspect of the beauty myth.

I am very suspicious of cameras and dramatic interpretations and the whole Hollywood myth-making process. I don't trust it. I've seen it affect people in bad ways.

Essentially, not only do we believe in this myth of 'de-risking', but it has become the one overriding goal; de-risking above growth, de-risking above innovation, de-risking above everything else. And we've reached the point where the Fed is using $70 Billion a month to 'de-risk' a largely insolvent banking system. And this can only end badly. The idea that you can do capitalism without risk is ridiculous on its face.