Quotes About Oral traditions

Many myths and religions have some kind of threat of retribution from their god or gods, and their doctrines warn of the dangers of doing various forbidden things. Why? Because memes involving danger are the ones we pay attention to! As oral traditions developed, our brains were set up to amplify the dangers and give them greater significance than the rest.

People shouldn't just talk about you, they should tell your tales.

No place is a place until things that have happened in it are remembered in history, ballads, yarns, legends, or monuments. Fictions serve as well as facts.

People are often surprised to hear that Romani is in fact a fully fledged language just like any other, that it has its origins in India, that it is related to Sanskrit, an ancient language associated with Indian scholarship and religion, and that it has been preserved by the Romani populations through oral traditions and in a variety of dialects for many centuries.

Everything starts with fishermen's tales. Everywhere you go the fishermen talk.

There are constant cycles in history. There is loss, but it is always followed by regeneration. The tales of our elders who remember such cycles are very important to us now.

Everything I know is what I have been taught by the sayings and writings of people who have studied the sayings and writings of people who have—and so on.

Every day or two, I strolled to the village to hear some of the gossip which is incessantly going on there, circulating either from mouth to mouth, or from newspaper to newspaper, and which, taken in homeopathic doses, was really as refreshing in its way as the rustle of leaves and the peeping of frogs.

Unfortunately, there is no contemporary history of Rome prior to about 200 BC, when centuries of oral traditions were first committed to writing.

They played the things Duff had learned while crouching under Bantam Street windows, the old songs that had been great before some of the boys were born, things never set down on paper but kept alive in places and in memories such as these.

My [art]work attempts to recapture a history never written or narrated visually before. I reaffirm my identity as a Mexica-Tejana and assert a new system of existence through visual manifestations of the oral history, myths, legends, and more of the borderlands.

En los relatos de mamá, de la abuela, de la tía, estaban los grandes almacenes de historias. Sus voces han formado mi sintaxis, mis frases escritas no son más largas que el aliento que se precisa para pronunciarlas".

In the non-Greek stories, Persia, Egypt, even China, Central Asia, in oral traditions and written literature, anyone who fights Amazons admires their courage and beauty, and they want to be allies of the Amazon; they don't wanna kill them.

What I really had was stories, the oral traditions of my parents. We moved so much that that was really our encyclopedia. A dream world told to me from my parents in the living room.

I've always been interested in oral traditions and mythological stories and legends from antiquity that have to do with nature, attempts to explain mysterious or puzzling, or very striking phenomena from nature. Things that people observed or heard about in nature.

There are still many tribal cultures where poetry and song, there is just one word for them. There are other cultures with literacy where poetry and song are distinguished. But poetry always remembers that it has its origins in music.

John Lilly suggests whales are a culture maintained by oral traditions. Stories. The experience of an individual whale is valuable to the survival of its community. I think of my family stories—Mother's in particular—how much I need them now, how much I will need them later. It has been said when an individual dies, whole worlds die with them. The same could be said of each passing whale.

Myths have a very long memory.

The idea that accounts of the past shouldn't change is a product of literate cultures' reverence for the written word. Anthropologists will tell you that oral cultures understand the past differently; for them, their histories don't need to be accurate so much as they need to validate the community's understanding of itself. So it wouldn't be correct to say that their histories are unreliable; their histories do what they need to do.

The books under the dust, they were stories. Folktales, fairy tales, myths, and legends. They spanned the whole world. They went back centuries, and longer.

I know they's a lots of things in a family history that just plain aint so. Any family. The stories get passed on and the truth gets passed over. As the saying goes.

I just had a hunch that there might be kernels of truth or reality - scientific or historical reality - in stories about nature that are perpetuated in oral myths. That's how I got interested in it.

We hear stories from our parents and our grandparents about what life was like in the old country or wherever they came from. They are biblical. They are truth. There could be no alternate history.

Oral traditions of the islanders are obsessed with cannibalism; the most inflammatory taunt that could be snarled at an enemy was "The flesh of your mother sticks between my teeth.