Quotes About Culture

By failing to read or listen to poets, society dooms itself to inferior modes of articulation, those of the politician, the salesman or the charlatan.

However, despite our lack of facial hair, every Navajo recruit was still expected to put soap on his face each morning and scrape away his imaginary beard. What you did in boot camp did not have to make sense. You just had to do it.

Waiting is something you get used to when you're Native American.

Myth is what we call other people's religion.

Myth must be kept alive. The people who can keep it alive are the artists of one kind or another.

We need myths that will identify the individual not with his local group but with the planet.

Mythology may, in a real sense, be defined as other people's religion. And religion may, in a sense, be understood as popular misunderstanding of mythology. (8)

Mythology, in other words, is psychology misread as biography, history, and cosmology.

If you want to understand what's most important to a society, don't examine its art or literature, simply look at its biggest buildings.

You can tell what's informing a society by what the tallest building is.

Mythology is to relate found truth to the living of a life.

in America we have people from all kinds of backgrounds, all in a cluster, together, and consequently law has become very important in this country. Lawyers and law are what hold us together. There is no ethos.

A ritual is the enactment of a myth.

The best part of the Western tradition has included a recognition of and respect for the individual as a living entity. The function of the society is to cultivate the individual. It is not the function of the individual to to support society.

If a being from another world were to ask you, How can I learn what it's like to be human? a good answer would be, Study mythology.

the single hero story that seemed to be repeating itself everywhere — in the oldest Sumerian epics, in folktales from the Pacific Islands and the Siberian forests and the African savannah, in the lives of great religious heroes like Gautama ?akyam?ni and Jesus, in the case notes of psychiatric patients

Der Engländer, der sich im Urwald von Nigeria zum Dinner umkleidet, fühlt, daß diese Handlung einen Sinn hat.

One of the great disadvantages of a literary or scriptural tradition like the biblical one is that a deity or context of deities becomes crystallized, petrified at a certain time and place. The deity doesn't continue to grow, expand, or take into account new cultural forces and new realizations in the sciences, and the result is this make-believe conflict we have in our culture between science and religion.

Mythology is not invented rationally; mythology cannot be rationally understood.

In the West we know the military uniform, clerical collar, medical goatee, and judge's wig. But where people are naked, it is the body itself that must be changed.

beginning of my interest in comparative mythology.

They come from every culture but with timeless themes. CAMPBELL: The themes are timeless, and the inflection is to the culture.

Myth is much more important and true than history.

Pluralism makes a unifying myth impossible. But if we cannot reinstate such a mythology we can, at least, return to the source from which mythology springs - the creative imagination.