Quotes About Myth

Myth is a tale once believed as truth; believed, it is not myth, but religion. A tale once religiously believed that has come to be called a myth is something of religion corrupted with disbelief. What are beliefs for some societies but myths for others cannot fill spiritual vacancies in the life of those others.

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.

A myth is a fixed way of looking at the world which cannot be destroyed because, looked at through the myth, all evidence supports the myth.

I do not know who first invented the myth of sexual equality. But it is a myth willfully fostered and nourished by certain semi-scientists and other fiction writers. And it has done more, I suspect, to unsettle marital happiness than any other false doctrine of this myth-ridden age.

The myth that the CEO is going to discover you and nurture you and ask you to join her for lunch is just that, a Hollywood myth.

Our powerful hunger for myth is a hunger for community. The person without a myth is a person without a home...To be a member of one's community is to share in its myths.

This is our dilemma--either to taste and not to know or to know and not to taste--or, more strictly, to lack one kind of knowledge because we are in an experience or to lack another kind because we are outside it. [. . .] Of this tragic dilemma myth is the partial solution. In the enjoyment of a great myth we come nearest to experiencing as a concrete what can otherwise be understood only as an abstraction.

I do think that this represents a kind of shift towards myth, a recovery of myth, largely through the popularity of writers like Philip Pullman. Somehow myths have returned as a serious subject. It used to be scorned...really scorned. It was part of a nursery tradition, and it was also rather tainted - but not in an immovable way - by the association with right-wing ideologies after the World Wars.

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

Myth is the hidden part of every story, the buried part, the region that is still unexplored because there are as yet no words to enable us to get there. Myth is nourished by silence as well as by words.

It would not be too much to say that myth is the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human cultural manifestation. Religions, philosophies, arts, the social forms of primitive and historic man, prime discoveries in science and technology, the very dreams that blister sleep, boil up from the basic, magic ring of myth.

The myth of the strong black woman is the other side of the coin of the myth of the beautiful dumb blonde.

The myth does not point to a fact; the myth points beyond facts to something that informs the fact

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.

Looking back over a decade one sees the ideal of a university become a myth, a vision, a meadow lark among the smoke stacks. Yet perhaps it is there at Princeton, only more elusive than under the skies of the Prussian Rhineland or Oxfordshire; or perhaps some men come upon it suddenly and possess it, while others wander forever outside. Even these seek in vain through middle age for any corner of the republic that preserves so much of what is fair, gracious, charming and honorable in American life.

The great myth of our times is that technology is communication.

After chiding the theologian for his reliance on myth and miracle, science found itself in the unenviable position of having to create mythology of its own: namely, the assumption that what, after long effort, could not be proved to take place today had, in truth, taken place in the primeval past.

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

I would be copping out if I stayed in the myth of the '60s.

Somebody said to me, 'But the Beatles were anti-materialistic.' That's a huge myth. John and I literally used to sit down and say, 'Now, let's write a swimming pool.'

(Propaganda) proceeds by psychological manipulations, character modifications, by creation of stereotypes useful when the time comes - The two great routes that this sub-propaganda takes are the conditioned reflex and the myth

To try to write a grand cosmical drama leads necessarily to myth. To try to let knowledge substitute ignorance in increasingly larger regions of space and time is science.

I think Stephen Crane too becomes trapped in a myth that poetry should be operating at a certain level, that there's the real world and the reflection of that real world. I don't exist in any of these historical periods. I exist in the period in which I'm writing the book. So I only attempt to frame this in a way that I myself relate to.

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.

Well, it's like that myth about the hero. He made wings out of wax so he could fly, but when he got too close to the Sun, to God, the wax melted and he crashed to the ground.

The myth of hell represents all the meanness, all the revenge, all the selfishness, all the cruelty, all the hatred, all the infamy of which the heart of man is capable.

Whereas Absurdism in Europe seemed a logical, almost inevitable response to the irrationality of war, the analogous elements that surfaced in American drama seemed more a response to a materialist society run amok. The American-style Absurdism seemed to spring full-blown out of television advertisements and situation comedies, which had become new myth-making machines.

Schools, the institutions traditionally called upon to correct social inequality, are unsuited to the task; without economic opportunity to follow educational opportunity, the myth of equality can never become real. Far more than a hollow promise of future opportunity for their children, parents need jobs, income, and services. And children whose backgrounds have stunted their sense of the future need to be taught by example that they are good for more than they dared dream.

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

I was essentially paid to perpetuate the myth that we are all, or should at least try to be, 17 and a size 2 forever.

Stumbling upon the next great invention in an 'ah-ha!' moment is a myth.

History is a myth that men agree to believe.

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

Never met such a Gorgon . . . I don't really know what a Gorgon is like, but I am quite sure that Lady Bracknell is one. In any case, she is a monster, without being a myth, which is rather unfair.

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.

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.

Some of us do not accept the Establishment myth that bad laws must be obeyed.

The myth works to make the very real things people don't want to look at visible for them.

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.

Why does it seem to be more and more challenging to find a perfect mate or maintain a happy and compatible relationship? Was love always this difficult? Haven't we heard stories of people being truly fulfilled and happy in love? Is love a myth? There are more people on the planet than ever before, and traveling the world has never been easier. Not only that; now we can use technologies like the Internet to connect with others. So what is the problem? Why does it seem to be more complicated than ever to meet the right person and live happily ever after?

Far more people die in the developing world than in the West. At religious festivals mainly. That's not a myth - the numbers don't lie. I think it's just because in the West crowds tend to be manufactured by commercial interesting, and they have, or at least should have, a responsibility for keeping people safe.

This is all I ever wanted - to help students and artists see myth as a reflection of the one sublime adventure of life, and then to breathe new life into it.

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.

You’re like a god from a Greek myth, Saiman. You have no empathy. You have no concept of the world beyond your ego. Wanting something gives you an automatic right to obtain it by whatever means necessary with no regard to the damage it may do. I would be careful if I were you. Friends and objects of deities’ desires dropped like flies. In the end the gods always ended up miserable and alone." — Kate Daniels

That famous writer’s block is a myth as far as I’m concerned. I think bad writers must have a great difficulty writing. They don’t want to do it. They have become writers out of reasons of ambition. It must be a great strain to them to make marks on a page when they really have nothing much to say, and don’t enjoy doing it. I’m not so sure what I have to say but I certainly enjoy making sentences.

Nothing will see us through the age we're entering but high consciousness, and that comes hard. We don't have a good, modern myth yet, and we need one.

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.

Those who claim absolutism is merely a myth are right that it has been misused simply as a byword for political centralisation.