Quotes About Myth

A ritual is the enactment of a myth. And, by participating in the ritual, you are participating in the myth. And since myth is a projection of the depth wisdom of the psyche, by participating in a ritual, participating in the myth, you are being, as it were, put in accord with that wisdom, which is the wisdom that is inherent within you anyhow. Your consciousness is being re-minded of the wisdom of your own life.

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?

The first myth of management is that it exists. The second myth of management is that success equals skill.

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

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

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 costliest myth of our time has been the myth of the Communist monolith.

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.

Nowhere was Darwin able to point to one bona fide case of natural selection having actually generated evolutionary change in nature....Ultimately, the Darwinian theory of evolution is no more nor less than the great cosmogenic myth of the twentieth century.

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.

As for the men in power, they are so anxious to establish the myth of infallibility that they do their utmost to ignore truth.

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.

Life balance is a myth. It's an illusion and the very pursuit of it is driving us crazy. For me it's about proportion - it's really a work hard/play hard equation.

Darwinism has become our culture's official creation myth, protected by a priesthood as dogmatic as any religious curia.

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.

Myth and tool mutually constitute each other.

When we think of his lone effort to live and its bleak reward, the mind turns to the myth "for His mercy endureth forever," with confiding revulsion.

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

The biggest myth about fatherhood that you get given a direct phone number to talk to Santa and tell him how your kid has been behaving. Absolute bullshit. I got an email address and it's just giving me an out of office reply.

I think the big myth about habits, and happiness too, is that there's somehow a magic "one size fits all" solution. That, "If it works for you it's going to work for me," and it's just a matter of figuring out what that habit would be, whether that's do it first thing in the morning, or start small, or do it for thirty days, or give yourself a cheat day.

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.

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

It's another myth that dancing distorts or destroys your feet. If you have the right shaped foot to start and a good, strong technique, your feet should be fine.

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.

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

In many college English courses the words “myth” and “symbol” are given a tremendous charge of significance. You just ain’t no good unless you can see a symbol hiding, like a scared gerbil, under every page. And in many creative writing course the little beasts multiply, the place swarms with them. What does this Mean? What does that Symbolize? What is the Underlying Mythos? Kids come lurching out of such courses with a brain full of gerbils. And they sit down and write a lot of empty pomposity, under the impression that that’s how Melville did it.

I think Stephen Crane too becomes trapped in a myth that poetry should be operating at a certain level, that there's the real world and the reflection of that real world. I don't exist in any of these historical periods. I exist in the period in which I'm writing the book. So I only attempt to frame this in a way that I myself relate to.

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.

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.

When we start making distinctions between soul and spirit, we're in very, very murky waters. There is the whole issue of the English language, which has a rather limited vocabulary when it comes to psychological descriptions, not to speak of spiritual descriptions. We're good mythically - the English language is superb for myth. But we're not very good for psychology or spirituality.

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

Schools, the institutions traditionally called upon to correct social inequality, are unsuited to the task; without economic opportunity to follow educational opportunity, the myth of equality can never become real. Far more than a hollow promise of future opportunity for their children, parents need jobs, income, and services. And children whose backgrounds have stunted their sense of the future need to be taught by example that they are good for more than they dared dream.

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.

The ugly duckling is a misunderstood universal myth. It's not about turning into a blonde Barbie doll or becoming what you dream of being; it's about self-revelation, becoming who you are.

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.

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 Bardot is finished, but Brigitte is me.

Happiness is a myth. It was invented to make us buy new things.

We need to stop buying into the myth about gender equality. It isn't a reality yet. Today, women make up half of the U.S. workforce, but the average working woman earns only 77 percent of what the average working man makes. But unless women and men both say this is unacceptable, things will not change.

I think another [myth] is that some marriages are just hopeless. This is a common thing I hear from people, "Well, I just think there are some marriages that are hopeless, Dr. Chapman, don't you agree with that?" I say I understand the feeling, but the fact is that there are no marriages that are hopeless.

As Christians learn how self-styled Jews have spent millions of dollars to manufacture the 'Jewish myth' for Christian consumption and that they have done this for economic and political advantage, you will see a tremendous explosion against the Jews. Right thinking Jewish leaders are worried about this, since they see it coming.

Not in the name of a necessary protection of the white race did the European break into China, but for the benefit of the Jewish-mercantile greed for profit. He thus dishonored himself, destroying a whole civilization, provoking justified indignation. China fights for its myth, for its race, and its ideals, as does the renewal-movement in Germany against the mercantile race that rules all stock markets and the actions of most governments.

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

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

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'.

This is all I ever wanted - to help students and artists see myth as a reflection of the one sublime adventure of life, and then to breathe new life into it.

We must refuse to submit to those institutions which are by definition sexist - marriage, the nuclear family, religions built on the myth of feminine evil.

I am confident that those who believe in belief are wrong. That is, we no more need to preserve the myth of God in order to preserve a just and stable society than we needed to cling to the Gold Standard to keep our currency sound. It was a useful crutch, but we've outgrown it. Denmark, according to a recent study, is the sanest, healthiest, happiest, most crime-free nation in the world, and by and large the Danes simply ignore the God issue. We should certainly hope that those who believe in belief are wrong, because belief is waning fast, and the props are beginning to buckle.