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 myth, comes down from the heaven of legend and imagination to the earth of history. It happens - at a particular date, in a particular place, followed by definable historical consequences. We pass from a Balder or an Osiris, dying nobody knows when or where, to a historical Person crucified (it is all in order) under Pontius Pilate. By becoming fact it does not cease to be myth: that is the miracle.

There is a sad myth going around today - the myth of neutrality. According to this myth, the secular world gives every point of view an equal chance to be heard. And it works fairly well - unless you are a Christian.

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?

Symbols are specific acts or figures, while myths develop and elaborate these symbols into a story which contains characters and several episodes. The myth is thus more inclusive. But both symbol and myth have the same function psychologically; they are man's way of expressing the quintessence of his experience - his way of seeing his life, his self-image and his relations to the world of his fellow men and of nature - in a total figure which at the same moment carries the vital meaning of this experience.

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 golden age of equal rights in Spain was a myth, and belief in it was a result, more than a cause, of Jewish sympathy for Islam. The myth was invented by Jews in nineteenth-century Europe as a reproach to Christians.

The fairy tale, which to this day is the first tutor of children because it was once the first tutor of mankind, secretly lives on in the story. The first true storyteller is, and will continue to be, the teller of fairy tales. Whenever good counsel was at a premium, the fairy tale had it, and where the need was greatest, its aid was nearest. This need was created by myth. The fairy tale tells us of the earliest arrangements that mankind made to shake off the nightmare which myth had placed upon its chest.

There's a strange myth of Anglo-Saxonism. When the University of Virginia was founded by Thomas Jefferson, for example, its law school offered the study of "Anglo-Saxon Law." And that myth of Anglo-Saxonism carries right over into the early twentieth century.

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.

Children are much more understanding of the suddenness and arbitrariness of death than we are. The old fairy tales contain a lot of that, and we've stolen from them, just as they stole from Greek myth, which has that same mixture of pre-Christian chaos.

[P]rescientific people... could never guess the nature of physical reality beyond the tiny sphere attainable by unaided common sense. Nothing else ever worked, no exercise from myth, revelation, art, trance, or any other conceivable means; and notwithstanding the emotional satisfaction it gives, mysticism, the strongest prescientific probe in the unknown, has yielded zero.

I began to pick apart our knowledge of Frankenstein and discovered that the public's idea of this myth comes from a million different places... I became committed to recontextualizing it all so it all worked in one story.

When we say the South lost the Civil War, we mean the white South. The blacks were liberated. And it's trying to redefine this Southern myth and bring it in a more positive direction.

The Young Soldier It is not death Without hereafter To one in dearth Of life and its laughter, Nor the sweet murder Dealt slow and even Unto the martyr Smiling at heaven: It is the smile Faint as a (waning) myth, Faint, and exceeding small On a boy's murdered mouth.

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

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.

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

There is a segment of the American population that has been excluded from the national myth, and that should be redressed.

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.

Mythographer was suggested by the man who made my website, actually. I do write a lot about myth and I do feel it's a bit pompous to state it that way, but it does distinguish me from other writers. When it was first on the web, people began to use it in an ironical and satirical way. Now, however, people tend to use it straight.

Just getting totally absorbed in that and therefore when I came back around to [Buckminster Fuller] and found that much of it was made up, I realized that nevertheless, it really was crucial, crucial for how he understood himself, I believe, and certainly crucial for how anyone else ever engaged in his ideas and therefore as a starting point, how can we engage in his ideas today, but with a remove of knowing that it is a myth and being able to navigate it in that sort of level, at that level of reading him as a story.

Capitalism’s grow-or-die imperative stands radically at odds with ecology’s imperative of interdependence and limit. The two imperatives can no longer coexist with each other; nor can any society founded on the myth that they can be reconciled hope to survive. Either we will establish an ecological society or society will go under for everyone, irrespective of his or her status.

Society must cease to look upon 'progress' as something desirable. 'Eternal Progress' is a nonsensical myth. What must be implemented is not a 'steadily expanding economy', but a zero growth economy, a stable economy. Economic growth is not only unnecessary but ruinous.

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.

Today the function of the artist is to bring imagination to science and science to imagination, where they meet, in the myth.

That shoreline where the island of knowing meets the unfathomable sea of our own being is the landscape of myth.

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.

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

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.

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

Anthropologists have promulgated the myth of the peaceful savage so effectively that when actual deaths by war are tabulated for prestate simple societies, one is astonished by how such a notion can continue to be taught to students.

We're not the paragons of virtue that we'd all like to think we are. And so, to shatter that myth, God will use suffering to expose the stuff of which we're made.

Once upon a time . . .” “In the beginning was . . .” That’s the way it always starts off. Every story, gospel, history, chronicle, myth, legend, folktale, or old wives’ tale blues riff begins with “Woke up this mornin’. . . .

(I am) dealing not with the particular anecdote, but rather with the Spirit of Myth, which is generic to all myths at all times.

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'.

I think of mythology as the homeland of the muses, the inspirers of art, the inspirers of poetry. To see life as a poem and yourself participating in a poem is what the myth does for you.

Vulnerability is not weakness. And that myth is profoundly dangerous... I define vulnerability as emotional risk, exposure, uncertainty. It fuels our daily lives.

My research debunks the myth that many people seem to have . . . that you become a leader by fighting your way to the top. Rather, you become a leader by helping others to the top. Helping your employees is as important, and many times more so, than trying to get the most work out of them.

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 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.

After listening to the radio, I learned what the North Korean government had been telling us about the war was not true. This myth allowed the North to hold the South responsible for the war.

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.

I know I'm not a coal miner, but I do long hours and I never complain, and there is nowhere else I'd rather be. So, yeah, that's how I'd define myself. I want to do it right, and prove people wrong once and for all about the myth of child stars.

Order derived through submission and maintained by terror is not much of a safe guaranty; yet that is the only "order" that governments have ever maintained. True social harmony grows naturally out of solidarity of interests. In a society where those who always work never have anything, while those who never work enjoy everything, solidarity of interests is non-existent; hence social harmony is but a myth.... Thus the entire arsenal of governments - laws, police, soldiers, the courts, legislatures, prisons - is strenuously engaged in "harmonizing" the most antagonistic elements in society.

American public policy is run on a myth.

The only thing on my mind is getting into that ring and destroying a boxing myth, someone who has reached a level of infamy through doing a number of stupid things.

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.