Quotes About Myth

In terms of the mechanics of story, myth is an intriguing one because we didn't make myth up; myth is an imprinture of the human condition.

Myth, legend, and ritual ... function to maintain a status quo. That makes them singularly bad in coping with change, indeed counterproductive, for change is the enemy of myth.

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.

Therefore, even the lover of myth is a philosopher; for myth is composed of wonder.

In the native literatures of North America there aren't any novels. Instead, the major genre is myth. And myths are stories that are fundamentally about the world, not about human individuals. A myth needn't include any humans at all. If it does include them, they're usually minor characters - imaginary humans sent out like scouts to report back on what's happening in the mythworld, but not central participants in the action.

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.

Greatness is a transitory experience. It is never consistent. It depends in part upon the myth-making imagination of humankind. The person who experiences greatness must have a feeling for the myth he or she is in. That person must reflect what is projected upon him or her.

I was interested first of all in trying to capture this myth that was always changing and to create some sort of a master story, some version of the myth that resonated with me, since I could have taken more or less any detail that I wanted or the opposite and try to put that down on the page in a way that I could express from that outset for myself and for our readers what it was that was so magical about [Buckminster] Fuller's way of putting together the world.

No myth of miraculous creation is so marvelous as the face of man's evolution.

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.

What does all this mean finally, I kept asking like a college kid. Why does it make me want to cry? Maybe it’s that we are all outsiders, we are all making our own unusual way through a wilderness of normality that is just a myth.

The Russian myth that they broadcast to the world, and have their various surrogates in the West repeat, is that somehow the West took advantage of them, that we were mean to them. That writes out of history everything Strobe Talbott and Bill Clinton tried to do with Boris Yeltsin. Strobe Talbott leaned forward doing everything he could to help the Russians, and frankly, I have little patience for the notion that we gave them nothing but bad advice.

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 myth of the self-sufficient individual and of the self-sufficient, protected, and protective familytells us that those who need help are ultimately inadequate. And it tells us that for a family to need help--or at least to admit it publicly--is to confess failure. Similarly, to give help, however generously, is to acknowledge the inadequacy of the recipients and indirectly to condemn them, to stigmatize them, and even to weaken what impulse they have toward self-sufficiency.

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

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.

I myself, at one time, wanted to be like the explorers of the Himalayas that I used to read about; people intoxicated on the myth of history.

There is no one religion, no one truth and no myth lacks meaning

I had been a reader of THOR in college. I had read the Stan Lee and Jack Kirby stuff. I had loved it. I had been a Norse mythology fan since I was a kid and was thrilled to discover a comic that was kind of based on Norse mythology-there's not a one-to-one correspondence, but there's no reason there should be. I was delighted to find it, and I didn't care that it wasn't exactly the myth. For one thing, Thor didn't have red hair in the comics. I was fine with that.

Today, aid to Colombia is given under the pretext of a drug war. That's pretty hard to take seriously. Ten years ago, Amnesty International flatly called it a myth.

We have the kind of self-made-man myth, which says that super-successful people did it themselves.

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

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.

The myth that men are the economic providers and women, mainly, are mothers and care givers in the family has now been thoroughly refuted. This family pattern has never been the norm, except in a narrow middle-class segment.

A myth is the name of a terrible lie told by a smelly little brown person to a man in a white suit with a pair of binoculars.

The myth about me as a footballer has grown: I am now the lost Maradona of Norway.

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'.

The West Wing seems to be feeding the myth about how presidential politics are.

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.

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.

The idea of a liberal media bias is simply a myth. If only it were true, we might have a more humane, open-minded, and ultimately effective public debate on the issues facing the country.

It is true that race is a social fiction, a myth perpetuated by a variety of peoples throughout the modern period, especially, to further their own gains at the expense of others.

There's nothing you can do that's more important than being fulfilled. You become a sign, you become a signal, transparent to transcendence; in this way, you will find, live, and become a realization of your own personal myth.

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

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

The key to The Doors is the culture behind the myth.

I've always loved King Kong. He's like a modern-day myth, an icon of the cinema.

There is a myth that the portrait photographer is supposed to make the subject relax, and that's the real person. But I'm interested in whatever is going on. And I'm not that comfortable myself.

Women who just don't like each other because the other one is a woman and "women don't like each other" myth - that's not interesting to me at all. How do you compete in the market place, how you stay relevant after many years of being in the public eye - all of that. To me, that's interesting and that's real.

The great enemy of the truth is not the lie, deliberate, contrived and dishonest but the myth persistent, persuasive and unrealistic.

I wrote a couple of songs that had gypsy references in them. The only reason it happened was because that's what was coming through and I liked the idea at that period of time. But that doesn't mean that it's a myth or that I'm a gypsy. It's gotten totally out of context.

The one man team is a complete and total myth.

The video for 'Whatever' is kind of a documentary in a way. It's showing that love can last. Not just in your early 20s or your late 30s, but in your 50s, 60s and 70s. There's an awful myth out there that when you get married, love and lovemaking fade. It's not true.

Here I stand and make Both myth and reality in my own way And live the violence of my dream and of my reality.

I think that G-O-D is like the answer to a formula for creat­ing life. Or some kind of energy or anti­gravity. It's like the answer to an equation and it's become mythical over the years. But at one time we all knew what it was. I don't know when it was exactly, but that was the ancient knowledge. It's become diffused as it was handed down and turned into myth.

I have a better internal and intuitive understanding of folklore and myth than science and technology, so in that way fantasy is easier.

There is a whole myth about super people. That super people can do everything and they do it on their own.

In 1933-34, the Belgians conducted a census in order to issue ‘ethnic’ identity cards, which labelled every Rwandan as either Hutu (85%) of Tutsi (14%) or Twa (1%). The identity cards made it virtually impossible for Hutus to become Tutsis, and permitted the Belgians to perfect the administration of an apartheid system rooted in the myth of Tutsi superiority… Whatever Hutu and Tutsi identity may have stood for in the pre-colonial state no longer mattered; the Belgians had made ‘ethnicity’ the defining feature of Rwandan existence.