Quotes About Myth

Important thing about myth is that it's not just something that you believe, a myth is essentially a program for action. And unless you translate a mythical story, or a doctrine out of the church, into practical action, it just remains incomprehensible. Rather like the rules of a board game which seem very sort of dull and complicated and incomprehensible until you pick up the dice and start to play, when everything falls into place.

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.

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.

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.

Maybe this is all a bit of a myth, a willful desire to give each place its own unique aura. But doesn't any collective belief eventually become a kind of truth? If enough people act as if something is true, isn't it indeed "true," not objectively, but in the sense that it will determine how they will behave? The myth of unique urban character and unique sensibilities in different cities exists because we want it to exist.

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.

The power of both myth and art is this magical ability to open doors, to make connections - not only between us and the natural world, but between us and the rest of humanity. Myths show us what we have in common with every other human being, no matter what culture we come from, no matter what century we live in. . .and at the same time, mythic stories and art celebrate our essential differences.

Writer's block is a myth. I never see the gardeners suffering from gardening block.

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.

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.

Nothing can prevent us from another day and night, and the myth of perpetual flight.

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

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.

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.

The real truth about a lot of life's mysteries can be explained by science but people don't want to get in bed with science because it's cold. They prefer religion, myth, drama.

I think the Sixties in some ways is a barrier to young people today. They think of it, you know, what we're doing is not that. But it's partly the myth of the Sixties. It always felt embattled and small. It always, almost always, was a small group of people relative to the opposition around.

The romantic myth of the artist says that you are the Source. I have no illusion about that. Native Americans don't believe they are the Source. They have access to the Source. Endless access. But don't get confused.

The only thing they [government] want is better data. But data doesn't tell people someone is well educated. It's a vicious circle. There is some myth involved. Some of this attitude has a long history.

Somebody said to me, 'But the Beatles were anti-materialistic.' That's a huge myth. John and I literally used to sit down and say, 'Now, let's write a swimming pool.'

You think I'm cute?" He said thinkly, pulling on her hand. She was glad he couldn't see her face. "I think you're..." Beautiful. Breathtaking. Like the person in a Greek myth who makes one of the gods stop caring about being a god.

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

To try to write a grand cosmical drama leads necessarily to myth. To try to let knowledge substitute ignorance in increasingly larger regions of space and time is science.

In my whole life, I've never vomited from seeing something disgusting. Does it really even happen, outside of movies and TV? I believe it may be a myth.

No way, no how did I break into NORAD. That's a complete myth. And I never attempted to access anything considered to be classified government systems.

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

Arthuriana has become a genre in itself, more like TV soap opera where people think they know the characters. All that's fair enough, but it does remove the mythic power of the feminine and masculine principles. So I prefer it in its original form, even if you have to wade through Mallory's 'Le Morte d'Arthur' - people smashing people for pages and pages! It still has the resonances of myth about it, which makes it work for me. I don't want to know if Mordred led an unhappy childhood or not.

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 idea of eternal return is a mysterious one, and Nietzsche has often perplexed other philosophers with it: to think that everything recurs as we once experienced it, and that the recurrence itself recurs ad infinitum! What does this mad myth signify?

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

All the Greek mythic heroes had gone east, but they were myths. Achilles was a myth. Perseus, Theseus, Hercules... they probably existed in some form. But they all went east. That's where a Greek went to make his bones so to speak. And Alexander the Great was the first man who actually went east not to plunder, not to loot and come back to Greece - which is where the Macedonians wanted to go back with the money. He stayed. And he became half-Eastern.

For me, there was no great myth around the movies when I was a young child. My father was very simple about the whole thing. He did not consider cinema an art. Cinema was entertainment. Literature and music were art.

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

The first myth of management is that it exists.

The myth of independence from the mother is abandoned in mid- life as women learn new routes around the mother--both the mother without and the mother within. A mid-life daughter may reengage with a mother or put new controls on care and set limits to love. But whatever she does, her child's history is never finished.

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.

Science is much closer to myth than a scientific philosophy is prepared to admit. It is one of the many forms of thought that have been developed by man, and not necessarily the best. It is conspicuous, noisy, and impudent, but it is inherently superior only for those who have already decided in favour of a certain ideology, or who have accepted it without ever having examined its advantages and its limits.

No, I don't think about the myth of the West. It's not the kind of thinking I do. That's more suited to people who live in big towns on the West Coast or East Coast, people who stay under a roof, in a room, all the time.

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

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

Despite the myth that men are less committed, they are predisposed to desire marriage.

Although every organized religion works overtime to contribute its own brand of misogyny to the myth of woman-hate, woman-fear, and woman-evil, the Roman Catholic church also carries the immense power of very directly affecting women's lives everywhere by its stand against birth control and abortion, and by its use of skillful and wealthy lobbies to prevent legislative change. It is an obscenity-an all-male hierarchy, celibate or not, that presumes to rule on the lives and bodies of millions of women.

Great historians can make the discovery of the real story more exciting than the romantic myth. Stacy Schiff, a great historian as well as a wonderful writer, peels away the layers to reveal the true Cleopatraa much more interesting woman than the Hollywood version and, as it turns out, a formidable queen after all.

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.

First bubble baths. Now Disney parks. You're shattering every creep vampire myth I've ever heard.

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

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.

Equality is a myth to protect the weak. some of us are strong in the Force, others are not. Only a fool believes otherwise.

I think it's a myth that American public or any other public is so stupid that they need to be constantly pricked.