Quotes About Myth

The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact. The old myth of the Dying God, without ceasing to be a myth, comes down from the heaven of legend and imagination to the earth of history.

Myth was regarded as primary; it was concerned with what was thought to be timeless and constant in our existence. Myth looked back to the origins of life, to the foundations of culture, and to the deepest levels of the human mind. Myth was not concerned with practical matters, but with meaning. Unless we find some significance in our lives, we mortal men and women fall very easily into despair. The mythos of a society provided people with a context that made sense of their day-to-day lives; it directed their attention to the eternal and the universal.

Here is a myth for you if myths are your pleasure: "There is no more opportunity in this world." Most people held this false belief fifty years ago, the majority agreed with it five years ago, and practically everyone clings to it today. Clearly, this myth will also be the screaming rage in the future. Hang on to this myth, and you are destined to miss great opportunities for the rest of your life.

How then can we account for the persistence of the myth that inside the empty nest lives a shattered and depressed shell of a woman--a woman in constant pain because her children no longer live under her roof? Is it possible that a notion so pervasive is, in fact, just a myth?

Important thing about myth is that it's not just something that you believe, a myth is essentially a program for action. And unless you translate a mythical story, or a doctrine out of the church, into practical action, it just remains incomprehensible. Rather like the rules of a board game which seem very sort of dull and complicated and incomprehensible until you pick up the dice and start to play, when everything falls into place.

It is my belief that we need a new transnational sustaining 'myth' that can impart value and respect. It is my further belief that we are coming to see our universe and life as creative, without a directing agency. Meaning emerges with life. If this view becomes widespread, it has the promise to become the sustaining myth we need to sustain in turn an emerging global civilization.

A myth is far truer than a history, for a history only gives a story of the shadows, whereas a myth gives a story of the substances that cast the shadows.

The costliest myth of our time has been the myth of the Communist monolith.

We thought everybody knew by now that barrel length has almost nothing to do with accuracy. I believe the myth of the superior accuracy of a long rifle dates from colonial days, when the only way to extend sight radius was to make the barrel as long as possible. It is interesting how long it takes a myth to die.

Today I want to dispel this myth, because it is absolutely not true .[ that ARV's work ] The pharmaceutical industry and those who have a vested interest in the drug industry fuels this propaganda.

Evolution is the creation-myth of our age. By telling us our origin it shapes our views of what we are. It influences not just our thought, but our feelings and actions too, in a way which goes far beyond its official function as a biological theory.

Black magic is not a myth. It is a totally unscientific and emotional form of magic, but it does get results — of an extremely temporary nature.

A myth is a lie that conceals or reveals a truth. But if it reveals even a strand of history or truth, that's what gets my adrenaline going.

Myth is an attempt to narrate a whole human experience, of which the purpose is too deep, going too deep in the blood and soul, for mental explanation or description.

It's an absolute myth that early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise. Of course it doesn't.

I could scream down 90 mountains to less than dust if only one living human had eyes in the head and heart in the body, but there is no chance, my god, no chance. rat with rat dog with dog hog with hog, play the piano drunk listen to the drunk piano, realize the myth of mercy stand still as even a child's voice snarls and we have not been fooled, it was only that we wanted to believe.

The myth of black women profiting at the expense of black men is the oldest rap around.

Often their rage erupts because they believe that all ways of looking that highlight difference subvert the liberal belief in a universal subjectivity (we are all just people) that they think will make racism disappear. They have a deep emotional investment in the myth of sameness even as their actions reflect the primacy of whiteness as a sign informing who they are and how they think.

Well, I really think that shatters the myth of white supremacy once and for all.

God is, to me, pretty much a myth created over time to deny the idea that we're all responsible for our own actions.

Each religion, by the help of more or less myth, which it takes more or less seriously, proposes some method of fortifying the human soul and enabling it to make its peace with its destiny.

What really terrifies Americans is the prospect that the Indian is very much alive, that the Indian is having nine babies in Guatemala, and that those nine babies are headed this way. This is one reason why Americans hold on so dearly to the myth of the dead Indian.

Rationalism belongs to the cool observer. But because of the stupidity of the average person, they follow not reason, but faith. This naïve faith, requires necessary illusions and emotionally potent oversimplifications, which are provided by the myth maker to keep the ordinary person on course.

Wherever the poetry of myth is interpreted as biography, history, or science, it is killed.

Corporations care very much about maintaining the myth that government is necessarily ineffective, except when it is spending money on the military-industrial complex, building prisons, or providing infrastructural support for the business sector.

The myth of the impossible dream is more powerful than all the facts of history.

A middle ground might be to fight for same-sex marriage and its benefits and then, once granted, redefine the institution of marriage completely, to demand the right to marry not as a way of adhering to society's moral codes but rather to debunk a myth and radically alter an archaic institution. [Legalizing "same-sex marriage"] is also a chance to wholly transform the definition of family in American culture.

Nothing endures unless it has first been transposed into a myth, and the great advantage of myths is that they are ladies with portable roots.

The myth of Bardot is finished, but Brigitte is me.

People seek escape in myth by any means at their disposal, including drugs, alcohol, meditation, and lies.

Every country that has experimented with women in actual combat has abandoned the idea, and the notion that Israel uses women in combat is a feminist myth.

Not in the name of a necessary protection of the white race did the European break into China, but for the benefit of the Jewish-mercantile greed for profit. He thus dishonored himself, destroying a whole civilization, provoking justified indignation. China fights for its myth, for its race, and its ideals, as does the renewal-movement in Germany against the mercantile race that rules all stock markets and the actions of most governments.

Carl Jung put [Orfeo Angelucci] in his last book [Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky, Harcourt, Brace & World, 1959]. He said Orfeo had made up a new bible.

[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.

Some part of me knew from the first that what I wanted was not reality but myth.

Incredibly deep research combines with the talents of a fine historian and writer to produce superb narrative history. The true character and relationship of these two iconic westerners emerge to suppress myth and correct more than a century of tomes laden with bad history.

And some things that should not have been forgotten were lost. History became legend. Legend became myth. And for two and a half thousand years, the ring passed out of all knowledge.

Roberto Calasso's survey of the renewed interest in myth demonstrates how decisive the gods' influence was on modern literature. Calasso is not only immensely learned; he is one of the most original thinkers and writers we have today.

When someone admits one and rejects another which is equally in accordance with the appearances, it is clear that he has quitted all physical explanation and descended into myth.

The reality is that you are the spirit. The rest is a myth.

Unconscious of your story, you are in its grasp; but with consciousness, an alchemical process begins: The solidity of the complex dissolves and you can open up to the arrival of a new archetype, the birth of a new cycle of life. In the shadow, then, lies our myth and our fate.

It doesn't matter how far you might rise. At some point you are bound to stumble because if you’re constantly doing what we do, raising the bar. If you're constantly pushing yourself higher, higher the law of averages not to mention the Myth of Icarus predicts that you will at some point fall. And when you do I want you to know this, remember this: there is no such thing as failure. Failure is just life trying to move us in another direction.

I think in a lot of ways unconditional love is a myth. My mom's the only reason I know it's a real thing.

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.

The poem is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful.

The greatest myth of all is what America is. I think that America is such an incredibly dynamic place because of immigration.

Everything is grounded in mystery. Everything is swimming, and the stable does not exist. Life is a series of guesses, and there is mystery in a match. The commonplace is the habitual, and the habitual is a mystery that has grown stale from sense-insistence. Life undulates; there is no such thing as a level; a straight line is a myth, and all directions are indirections.

We have had a long held myth of American exceptionalism.