Quotes About Myth

The myth is the public domain and the dream is the private myth. If your private myth, your dream, happens to coincide with that of the society, you are in good accord with your group. If it isn't, you've got a long adventure in the dark forest ahead of you.

While I generally find that great myths are great precisely because they represent and embody great universal truths, the myth of romantic love is a dreadful lie. Perhaps it is a necessary lie in that it ensures the survival of the falling-in-love experience that traps us into marriage. But as a psychiatrist I weep in my heart almost daily for the ghastly confusion and suffering that this myth fosters. Millions of people waste vast amounts of energy desperately and futilely attempting to make the reality of their lives conform to the unreality of the myth.

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?

This country has such little sense of itself sometimes, I'm astonished. America is one of the biggest myth-making countries, whether we're talking about how many books are published, how many movies we make. But the greatest myth of all is what America is.

The whole thing died in my mind long before the rumpus started. We used to believe the Beatles myth just as much as the public and we were in love with them just the same way. But we were four individuals who eventually recovered our individualities after being submerged in a myth.

The most dangerous leadership myth is that leaders are born - that there is a genetic factor to leadership. This myth asserts that people simply either have certain charismatic qualities or not. That's nonsense; in fact, the opposite is true. Leaders are made rather than born.

History is the myth, the true myth, of man's fall made manifest in time.

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.

Freud becomes one of the dramatis personae, in fact, as discoverer of the great and beautiful modern myth of psychoanalysis. By myth, I mean a poetic, dramatic expression of a hidden truth; and in placing this emphasis, I do not intend to put into question the scientific validity of psychoanalysis.

We thought everybody knew by now that barrel length has almost nothing to do with accuracy. I believe the myth of the superior accuracy of a long rifle dates from colonial days, when the only way to extend sight radius was to make the barrel as long as possible. It is interesting how long it takes a myth to die.

The myth does not point to a fact; the myth points beyond facts to something that informs the fact

Puffy's the only guy who's jealous. All drummers want to be singers. I think it's a myth that the singer needs to be the focus. Bands perpetuate that myth. With somebody like Sebastian Bach it makes sense. Look at him. He could be in an Avon ad.

[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.

Before I came along, my field was dominated by myth, superstition, deceit, and outright fraud. I overcame it by the simple application of logical thinking.

We can certainly see contemporary examples of people who radically change. As long you believe your spouse will never change and you keep telling yourself that, then you live with no hope. But if you understand that that's a myth, then you open up the door to hope.

Follow the lead of your symptoms, for there’s usually a myth in the mess, and a mess is an expression of soul.

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.

The act of abortion positions women at their most powerful, and that is why it is so strongly opposed by many in society. Historically viewed as and conditioned to be passive, dependent creatures, victims of biological circumstance, women often find it difficult to embrace this power over life and death. They fall prey to the assumption, the myth, that they cannot be trusted with it.

In my opinion, nothing has contributed so much to the corruption of the original idea of socialism as the belief that Russia is a socialist country and that every act of its rulers must be excused, if not imitated. And so for the last ten years, I have been convinced that the destruction of the Soviet myth was essential if we wanted a revival of the socialist movement.

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.

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 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.

The fall [of your soul] from perfection into duality...was naturally followed by the discovery of the duality of good and evil...This is the Biblical version of a myth known to many lands.

Most people live in a myth and grow violently angry if anyone dares to tell them the truth about themselves.

The hero, whether god or goddess, man or woman, the figure in a myth or the dreamer of a dream discovers and assimilates his opposite (his own unsuspected self) either by swallowing it or by being swallowed.

I would be copping out if I stayed in the myth of the '60s.

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.

All myth is an enriched pattern, a two-faced proposition, allowing its operator to say one thing and mean another, to lead a double life. Hence the notion found early in ancient thought that all poets are liars. And from the true lies of poetry trickled out a question. What really connects words and things?

I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge. That myth is more potent than history. That dreams are more powerful than facts. That hope always triumphs over experience. That laughter is the only cure for grief. And I believe that love is stronger than death.

The person who experiences greatness must have a feeling for the myth he is in. He must reflect what is projected upon him. And he must have a strong sense of the sardonic. This is what uncouples him from belief in his own pretensions. The sardonic is all that permits him to move within himself. Without this quality, even occasional greatness will destroy a man.

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

I had incorrectly, for all of my adult life until 2008, believed the biggest voting myth that exists - that ex-felons cannot vote.

the unconscious of an artist is her greatest treasure. It is what transmutes the dross of autobiography into the gold 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.

I don't believe in the sort of "Eureka!" moment idea. I think it's a myth. I'm very suspicious that actually Archimedes had been thinking about that problem for a long time.

History is a myth that men agree to believe.

myself ... is merely an instrument to connect life and a myth

The first myth of management is that it exists.

If the majority of the "spiritual market" is drawn to prerational magic and myth, how do you reach the small group who are involved in genuine, laborious, demanding, transrational spiritual practice? This is very difficult, because both markets are referred to as "spiritual," but these two camps really don't get along very well-one is mostly translative, the other is mostly transformative, and they generally disapprove of each other-so how do you put them into one magazine without alienating them both?

The myth of unending consumption has taken the place of the belief in life everlasting.

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

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

Myths are public dreams; dreams are private myths. By finding your own dream and following it through, it will lead you to the myth-world in which you live. But just as in dream, the subject and object, though they seem to be separate, are really the same.

What's made up in the head is the fiction. What comes out of the heart is a myth.

Alongside the mythos of the eternal free soul stands the Myth, the religion of the blood.

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.

You know what, evolution is a myth. ... Why aren't monkeys still evolving into humans?