Quotes About Myth

But myth is something else than an explanation of the world, of history, and of destiny. Myth expresses in terms of the world - that is, of the other world or the second world - the understanding that man has of himself in relation to the foundation and the limit of his existence. Hence to demythologize is to interpret myth, that is, to relate the objective representations of the myth to the self-understanding which is both shown and concealed in it.

The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again.

The value of the myth is that it takes all the things we know and restores to them the rich significance which has been hidden by ‘the veil of familiarity.’ The child enjoys his cold meat, otherwise dull to him, by pretending it is buffalo, just killed with his own bow and arrow. And the child is wise. The real meat comes back to him more savory for having been dipped in a story…by putting bread, gold, horse, apple, or the very roads into a myth, we do not retreat from reality: we rediscover it.

If you live with the myths in your mind, you will find yourself always in mythological situations. They cover everything that can happen to you. And that enables you to interpret the myth in relation to life, as well as life in relation to myth.

It's what's known as an origin myth. What happened to me? That's no myth.

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

Ritual and myth are like seed crystals of new patterns that can eventually reshape culture around them.

News objectivity is a twentieth-century myth. We only complain about propaganda when we don't agree with it.

Commentating, illustrating, description giving, adjective expert, analyzing, surmising musical myth seeking people of the universe, this is yours.

Freedom is acquired by conquest, not by gift. It must be pursued constantly and responsibly. Freedom is not an ideal located outside of man; nor is it an idea which becomes myth. It is rather the indispensable condition for the quest for human completion.

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

But revision is a creative act, not merely an analytical imposition of rules of style on a more creative first draft. That's a myth - that the first draft is more creative and everything after that is ruining creativity.

Life knows us not and we do not know life—-we don’t know even our own thoughts. Half the words we use have no meaning whatever and of the other half each man understands each word after the fashion of his own folly and conceit. Faith is a myth and beliefs shift like mists on the shore; thoughts vanish; words, once pronounced, die; and the memory of yesterday is as shadowy as the hope of tomorrow

I've always been interested in the Southwest. There isn't a place in the world you can go where they don't know about cowboys and Indians and the myth of the West.

A 'death mirror' held up to American culture - Brando, bikes and black leather; Christ, chains and cocaine. A 'high' view of the myth of the American motorcyclist. The machine as totem from toy to terror. Thanatos in chrome and black leather and bursting jeans.

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.

The real truth about a lot of life's mysteries can be explained by science but people don't want to get in bed with science because it's cold. They prefer religion, myth, drama.

If you look at the heroes of antiquity and myth, they all have flaws. It's something that they have to overcome; their flaws are something that they have to act in spite of. The challenge is not to defy your fate, but to endure it. That is heroic.

The Bible became the book of books, but it is not one document. It is a mystical library of interwoven texts by unknown authors who wrote and edited at different times with widely divergent aims. This sacred work of so many epochs and so many hands contains some facts of provable history, some stories of unprovable myth, some poetry of soaring beauty, and many passages of unintelligible, perhaps coded, perhaps simply mistranslated, mystery. Most of it is written not to recount events but to promote a higher truth—the relationship of one people and their God.

Opening 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?'

The Rising was mainly a piece of streat theatre designed by poets for dramatic effect. For better or worse, it became part of the founding myth which states need - but which they should move on from after a time. Major John MacBride, in a cameo performance in which he left Jacobs Mill, as he had entered it, immaculately dressed down to the white spats, told his colleagues Next time lads, don't shut yourself up behind four walls. It was good advice.

Were it part of our everyday education and comment that the corporation is an instrument for the exercise of power, that it belongs to the process by which we are governed, there would then be debate on how that power is used and how it might be made subordinate to the public will and need. This debate is avoided by propagating the myth that the power does not exist.

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.

When 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.

As Plotinus tells us, we elected the body, the parents, the place, and the circumstances that suited the soul and that, as the myth says, belongs to its necessity.

God was gone; it was the silence of his departure. It was a rainy night. It was the myth of the rainy night. Dean was popeyed with awe. This madness would lead nowhere. I didn't know what was happening to me, and I suddenly realized it was only the tea that we were smoking; Dean had bought some in New York. It made me think that everything was about to arrive - the moment when you know all and everything is decided forever.

I 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.

My 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.

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.

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

I think a myth is created from truth.

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

All minorities think they're immune, but we're absolutely part of the one in five that gets skin cancer! It's a myth, and myths are meant to be debunked!

What dazzles us in Stacy Schiff's Cleopatra are not the alluring mythologies about the evasive queen, but the astonishing if rare historical facts that Schiff has meticulously and lovingly excavated. Schiff offers not just Cleopatra's story but the story of an amazing era, one that has vanished but still affects us, questioning the way we look at myth, history, and ourselves.

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

I don't have to live up to that Superwoman myth. I can cry and be human and lean on people who take care of me. That can be very liberating.

The kindly God who lovingly fashioned each and every one of us and sprinkled the sky with shining stars for our delight - that God is, like Santa Claus, a myth of childhood, not anything [that] a sane, undeluded adult could literally believe in. That God must either be turned into a symbol for something less concrete or abandoned altogether.

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

It is a myth of publishers that people want to read easy things.

[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.

The myth of the poor Jesus needs to be destroyed, because it's holding people back.

I'm a man of the marketplace as well as an artist. I'm a pawnbroker of myth.

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.

Without an understanding of myth or religion, without an understanding of the relationship between destruction and creation, death and rebirth, the individual suffers the mysteries of life as meaningless mayhem alone.

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'

There is a myth that the New Deal programs on their own pulled the US out of the Great Depression and created the conditions for the economic boom after World War II. As an economist, I can tell you, that is not true. In reality, it was mainly World War II that launched the boom - the massive war mobilization, the horrifying destruction and death caused by it, and then the reconstruction in its aftermath. he US was the only advanced capitalist country that was not bombed during the war.

From the first place of liquid darkness, within the second place of air and light, I set down the following record with its mixture of fact and truths and memories of truths and its direction toward the Third Place, where the starting point is myth.