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.

How then can we account for the persistence of the myth that inside the empty nest lives a shattered and depressed shell of a woman--a woman in constant pain because her children no longer live under her roof? Is it possible that a notion so pervasive is, in fact, just a myth?

Some writers may toy with the fancy of a ‘Christ-myth,’ but they do not do so on the ground of historical evidence. The historicity of Christ is as axiomatic for an unbiased historian as the historicity of Julius Caesar. It is not historians who propagate the ‘Christ-myth’ theories.

Without doubt the greatest injury of all was done by basing morals on myth. For, sooner or later, myth is recognized for what it is, and disappears. Then morality loses the foundation on which it has been built.

The myth that everyone once read great literature is just a myth.

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

It seems to me that obliviousness about white advantage, like obliviousness about male advantage, is kept strongly inculturated in the United States so as to maintain the myth of meritocracy, the myth that democratic choice is equally available to all. Keeping most people unaware that freedom of confident action is there for just a small number of people props up those in power and serves to keep power in the hands of the same groups that have most of it already.

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.

The myth is a surviving fragment of the psychic life of the infancy of the race whilst the dream is the myth of the individual.

Pure science is a myth: Both mathematical theoreticians like Albert Einstein and practical crackpots like Henry Ford dealt with different aspects of the same world.

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

You must forgive everyone. Now many would say that "We cannot forgive, it's very difficult." But it's a myth whether you forgive or don't forgive. What do you do? You don't do anything. But when you don't forgive, then you are playing into wrong hands. That means you are torturing yourself, while those who have troubled you are quite happy.

It is difficult to separate, at times, the myth from the truth.

Black magic is not a myth. It is a totally unscientific and emotional form of magic, but it does get results — of an extremely temporary nature.

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.

I think that we're just too invested in that myth that we are not connected, and are all potential millionaires if only we put in the work. I think that's destructive and ignores history and is one of the reasons we as a state are consistently at the bottom of all the lists because we handicap ourselves.

as for the possibility of 'having it all,' career and family with no sacrifice to either, that is a myth we would do well to abandon, together with the pernicious notion that a woman who chooses one of the other is somehow deficient.

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 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.

Some people are very identified, say with their country or maybe with their worshipping style , whatever it is. All these misidentifications have to be given up. It is very difficult for people because they are so conditioned and as long as you have conditioning you cannot rise above your mind, which is a myth, you cannot.

There's the whole myth about rocket science. It's really not that hard. It's not brain surgery.

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.

If I have something I want to say that is too difficult for adults to swallow, then I write it in a book for children. Children still haven't closed themselves off with fear of the unknown, fear of revolution, or the scramble for security. They are still familiar with the inborn vocabulary of myth

You know, I didn't write my books for critics and scholars. I wrote them for students and artists. When I hear how much my work has meant to them--well, I can't tell you how happy that makes me. That means that this great stuff of myth, which I have been so privileged to work with, will be kept alive for a whole new generation. That's the function of the artists, you know, to reinterpret the old stories and make them come alive again, in poetry, painting, and now in movies.

Often their rage erupts because they believe that all ways of looking that highlight difference subvert the liberal belief in a universal subjectivity (we are all just people) that they think will make racism disappear. They have a deep emotional investment in the myth of sameness even as their actions reflect the primacy of whiteness as a sign informing who they are and how they think.

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.

Westerns. A period gone by, the pioneer, the loner operating by himself, without benefit of society. It usually has something to do with some sort of vengeance; he takes care of the vengeance himself, doesn't call the police. Like Robin Hood. It's the last masculine frontier. Romantic myth. I guess, though it's hard to think about anything romantic today. In a Western you can think, Jesus, there was a time when man was alone, on horseback, out there where man hasn't spoiled the land yet.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Ego and conditionings are created by mind, which is a myth.

The Enlightenment was an attempt to liberate myth and base truth claims on evidence, not just dogma. But when science threw out the church, they threw out the baby with the bath water.

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'.

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

In the most important sense a creationist is a person who believes in creation, and that includes people who believe that Genesis is a myth and that creation involved a process called evolution and consumed billions of years.

American public policy is run on a myth.

If you take myth and folklore, and these things that speak in symbols, they can be interpreted in so many ways that although the actual image is clear enough, the interpretation is infinitely blurred, a sort of enormous rainbow of every possible colour you could imagine.

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

One the one hand, our economists treat human beings as rational actors making choices to maximize their own economic benefit. On the other hand, the same companies that hire those economists also pay for advertising campaigns that use the raw materials of myth and magic to encourage people to act against their own best interests, whether it's a matter of buying overpriced fizzy sugar water or the much more serious matter of continuing to support the unthinking pursuit of business as usual in the teeth of approaching disaster.

We often imagine that the court serves as a sort of neutral umpire controlling the warring political branches. But this is mostly myth. The justices of the Supreme Court are themselves actors in the struggle for power, and when they intervene, they think carefully about how their decisions will affect the courts own legitimacy and authority.

I wanted to connect a modern story with a myth that I had read.

As is so often the case with a legend, every incident has two possible interpretations, the plausible and the one that is molded to suit the making of the myth. Man is a romantic at heart and will always put aside dull, plodding reason for the excitement of an enigma. As Doc had pointed out, mystery, not logic, is what gives us hope and keeps us believing in a force greater than our own insignificance.