Quotes About Myth

Once a poet calls his myth a myth, he prevents the reader from treating it as a reality; we use the word "myth" only for stories we ourselves cannot believe.

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.

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.

Now that Scotty has entered the realm of myth, everyone wants to own him. And maybe they should. Doesn't a myth belong to everyone?

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.

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.

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.

There 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.

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.

The most important human endeavor is the striving for morality in our actions. Our inner balance and even our very existence depend on it. Only morality in our actions can give beauty and dignity to life. To make this a living force and bring it to clear consciousness is perhaps the foremost task of education. 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.

Myth is, after all, the neverending story.

Love is a deception and a trap. Love is as big a myth that God sits with his flowing white beard in a throne and looks at us.

In one African myth the word for God is even identical with skill and capacity. The Godhead is defined as that thing which appears in man as the mystery of an unusual skill or capacity. It is something divine, a spark of the divinity in him, not his own possession or achievement, but a miracle.

When 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.

As long as the family and the myth of the family ... have not been destroyed, women will still be oppressed.

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.

One 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.

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.

A brilliant analysis of leadership in democratic, authoritarian, and totalitarian states, Archie Brown's The Myth of the Strong Leader draws on a remarkably wide range of examples and is distinguished by the relevance of its insights and by the precision and clarity of their exposition. It is an absorbing read that deserves to become a modern classic of political thinking.

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.'

There's a myth among amateurs, optimists and fools that beyond a certain level of achievement, famous artists retire to some kind of Elysium where criticism no longer wounds and work materializes without their effort.

In my whole life, I've never vomited from seeing something disgusting. Does it really even happen, outside of movies and TV? I believe it may be a myth.

Myth is neither a lie nor a confession: it is an inflexion.

Although they like to call themselves journalists, that's a myth even they don't really believe anymore. They're mutts on short leashes.

Heraldry is the fusion of fact and fancy, myth and manner, romance and reality. It is an exuberant union of family, art, and history.

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.

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.

I was suckered in by the myth of the man [ William Burroughs] as much as by his work.

Myth is much more important and true than history. History is just journalism and you know how reliable that is.

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.

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

It's a myth that you need to understand all the ins and outs of music. The ideal scenario is you have a conceptual, directorial conversation about what you're trying to achieve in a theme and then trust your composer to go ahead and do that.

No, I don't think about the myth of the West. It's not the kind of thinking I do. That's more suited to people who live in big towns on the West Coast or East Coast, people who stay under a roof, in a room, all the time.

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.

The idea that guys should walk into a bar and confidently initiate contact and then seduce a woman based on a short term conversation is a toxic cultural myth that robs guys of self-confidence and that holds them up to an unrealistic standard that they have to become a super-extraverted narcissist in order to 'score with women'

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.

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.

I was 15 years old when I first heard the name Mandela, or Madiba, as he is fondly known in Africa. In apartheid South Africa he was public enemy number one. Shrouded in secrecy, myth and rumour, the media called him 'The Black Pimpernel'.

There are many beliefs that we have seen as truth in Western civilization for hundreds of years. We live according to these "truths" and as a result manifesting a life using those beliefs, which can be very self-destructive. So these beliefs will affect decisions in economics and politics and everything else that we do. One myth-perception is our continued emphasis of a Newtonian materialistic world, which by definition emphasizes the primacy of matter and somewhat ignores or minimizes the influence of the immaterial part of the universe.

A successful magazine has to build a myth its readers can believe in.

The value of myth is that it takes all the things you know and restores to them the rich significance which has been hidden by the veil of familiarity.

By myth I mean the arrangement of the incidents

Some batters, and good ones too, scoff at the whole theory of place hitting, calling it a myth. They are wrong, however.

I was there when Abbe Georges Lemaître first proposed this [Big Bang] theory. ... There is no rational reason to doubt that the universe has existed indefinitely, for an infinite time. .... It is only myth that attempts to say how the universe came to be, either four thousand or twenty billion years ago.

Every myth is psychologically symbolic. Its narratives and images are to be read, therefore, not literally, but as metaphors.

I'd never met a woman I considered as intelligent as me. That sounds bigheaded, but every woman I met was either a dolly-chick, or a sort of screwed-up intellectual chick. And of course, in the field I was in, I didn't meet many intellectual people anyway. I always had this dream of meeting an artist, an artist girl who would be like me. And I thought it was a myth, but then I met Yoko and that was it.

I see "demand creation" as a 20th-century construct that's bound up with advertising. It's an outmoded view of marketing that says, "First, we build a product or service, then we advertise it into people's lives." Embedded this view is the belief that companies control brands. This is a myth. My message all along has been that brands are actually created by customers, not companies. Companies only provide the raw materials - the products, messaging, behaviors - that people use these to create brands.