Quotes About Mythology

R?d?cina limbii este iraÈ›ional? È™i are un caracter magic. Danezul care articula numele lui Thor ori saxonul care articula numele lui Thunor nu È™tiau dac? aceste cuvinte însemnau zeul tunetului sau zgomotul care urmeaz? fulgerul. Poezia vrea s? se întoarc? la aceast? magie veche

Es fama entre los etíopes que los monos deliberadamente no hablan para que no los obliguen a trabajar

A présent j'avais sous la main un vaste fragment méthodique de l'histoire totale d'une planète inconnue, avec ses architectures et ses querelles, avec la frayeur de ses mythologies et la rumeur de la langue, avec ses empereurs et ses mers, avec ses minéraux et ses oiseaux et ses poissons, avec son algèbre et son feu, avec ses controverses théologiques et métaphysiques.

There is nothing more characteristic of a country than its imaginations. - Prologue to The Tiger Guest, P'u Sung-ling

Lo creerás, Ariadna? —dijo Teseo—. El minotauro apenas se defendió.

Gods suppressed become devils, and often it is these devils whom we first encounter when we turn inward.

Mythology is not a lie, mythology is poetry, it is metaphorical. It has been well said that mythology is the penultimate truth--penultimate because the ultimate cannot be put into words. It is beyond words. Beyond images, beyond that bounding rim of the Buddhist Wheel of Becoming. Mythology pitches the mind beyond that rim, to what can be known but not told.

Writer's block results from too much head. Cut off your head. Pegasus, poetry, was born of Medusa when her head was cut off. You have to be reckless when writing. Be as crazy as your conscience allows.

What is a god? A god is a personification of a motivating power of a value system that functions in human life and in the universe.

We have only to follow the thread of the hero path. And where we had thought to find an abomonation, we shall find a God. And where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves. And where we had thought to travel outward, we shall come to the center of our own existence. And where we had thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world.

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

The latest incarnation of Oedipus, the continued romance of Beauty and the Beast, stand this afternoon on the corner of 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue, waiting for the traffic light to change.

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)

When you translate the Bible with excessive literalism, you demythologize it. The possibility of a convincing reference to the individual's own spiritual experience is lost. (111)

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

How teach again, however, what has been taught correctly and incorrectly learned a thousand thousand times, throughout the millenniums of mankind's prudent folly? That is the hero's ultimate difficult task.

Mythology is composed by poets out of their insights and realizations. Mythologies are not invented; they are found. You can no more tell us what your dream is going to be tonight than we can invent a myth. Myths come from the mystical region of essential experience.

Clearly, mythology is no toy for children. Nor is it a matter of archaic, merely scholarly concern, of no moment to modern men of action. For its symbols (whether in the tangible form of images or in the abstract form of ideas) touch and release the deepest centers of motivation, moving literate and illiterate alike, moving mobs, moving civilizations.

But the makers of legend have seldom rested content to regard the world's great heroes as mere human beings who broke past the horizons that limited their fellows and returned such boons as any man with equal faith and courage might have found.

I would say that all our sciences are the material that has to be mythologized. A mythology gives spiritual import - what one might call rather the psychological, inward import, of the world of nature round about us, as understood today. There's no real conflict between science and religion ... What is in conflict is the science of 2000 BC ... and the science of the 20th century AD.

A myth is something that has never happened, but is happening all the time.

It has always been the prime function of mythology and rite to supply the symbols that carry the human spirit forward, in counteraction to those that tend to tie it back.

The problem in middle life, when the body has reached its climax of power and begins to decline, is to identify yourself not with the body, which is falling away, but with the consciousness of which it is a vehicle. This is something I learned from myths.

One finds the same basic mythological themes in all the religions of the world, from the most primitive to the most sophisticated, from the North American plains to European forests to Polynesian atolls. The imagery of myth is a language, a lingua franca that expresses something basic about our deepest humanity. It is variously inflected in its various provinces.