Quotes from Lewis Hyde

I think of a myth as a story that helps you explain all the different pieces of your life. In that broad sense, there is no way to live without mythology.

Science may not be as intimate as the medical profession; nonetheless, it certainly is a community in which ideas are often shared as contributions, not as proprietary things.

The gift finds the man attractive who stands with an empty bowl he does not own.

Circular giving differs from reciprocal giving in several ways. First, when the gift moves in a circle no one ever receives it from the same person he gives it to. I

Scarcity appears when wealth cannot flow. Elsewhere

In one sense the reemergence of ancient usury bespeaks a decline in faith. Gift exchange is connected to faith because both are disinterested. Faith does not look out. No one by himself controls the cycle of gifts he participates in; each, instead, surrenders to the spirit of the gift in order for it to move. Therefore, the person who gives is a person willing to abandon control. If

As such, he is sometimes the messenger of the gods and sometimes the guide of souls, carrying the dead into the underworld or opening the tomb to release them when they must walk among us.

Creativity in science is almost always cumulative and collaborative; it proceeds collectively and thus thrives when barriers to collectivity are reduced.

Nothing is more dangerous to liberty than the power of entailed art and ideas. The very soul of a republic is the common citizen's inalienable access to knowledge.

gift revives the soul.

Trickster is among other things the gatekeeper who opens the door into the next world; those who mistake him for a psychopath never even know such a door exists.

All that we make and do is shaped by the communities and traditions that contain us, not to mention by money, power, politics, and luck. And even should the artist or scientist think she has extracted herself from the world to stand alone in the studio, a tremendous array of faculties and mind-states may well attend her creativity.

Collective inquiry is less prone to error than is solitary inquiry, individualism in this case being an impediment to knowledge.

As for our own age, Habermas speaks of "a refeudalization of the public sphere," what with the fusion of news and advertising, the corporate ownership of media, the return of government secrecy, the intrusion of celebrity into politics

those who care for the good of their country have a duty to publish and that in doing so no one should allow "any private Views or Ends (inconsistent with the common Good) to bias or influence him.

claim is often made that without the near-term rewards of monopoly privilege, knowledge would not advance. This assumes a strikingly narrow notion of what motivates people to do creative work.

The gift moves in a circle, and two people do not make much of a circle. Two points establish a line, but a circle lies in a plane and needs at least three points. This

Thus for Webster "the very soul of a republic" was to be found in "an equality of property, with a necessity of alienation, constantly operating to destroy combinations of powerful families.

When the gift moves in a circle its motion is beyond the control of the personal ego, and so each bearer must be a part of the group and each donation is an act of social faith.

The problem is that wealth ceases to move freely when all things are counted and priced. It may accumulate in great heaps, but fewer and fewer people can afford to enjoy it. After the

when we profit on exchange or convert 'one man's gift to another man's capital' – we nourish that part of our being (or our group) which is distinct and separate from others. Negative reciprocity strengthens the spirits – constructive or destructive – of individualism and clannishness.

Only when the increase of gifts moves with the gift may the accumulated wealth of our spirit continue to grow among us, so that each of us may enter, and be revived by, a vitality beyond his or her solitary powers.

I discovered in belles-lettres that the Giver can be transformed into his own Gift, that is, into a pure object. Chance had made me a man, generosity would make me a book. JEAN-PAUL SARTRE

Most of the travelers, liars, thieves, and shameless personalities of the twentieth century are not tricksters at all, then. Their disruptions are not subtle enough, or pitched at a high enough level. Trickster isn't a run-of-themill liar and thief. When he lies and steals, it isn't so much to get away with something or get rich as to disturb the established categories of truth and property and, by so doing, open the road to possible new worlds.