Quotes About Mythology

He was himself a great reader of old legends and romances, and often lamented that he could not believe in them; for a superstitious person, he thought, must live in a kind of fairyland.

Sita in the Ramayana is an ex-goddess, a human with traces of her former divinity that the story does not erase but largely ignores, whereas Rama is a god in the making, whose moral imperfections leave traces that future generations will scurry to erase. The two meet in passing, like people standing on adjacent escalators, Rama on the way up, Sita on the way down.

whether or not people get the gods that they deserve, they tend to get the gods (and demons) that their animals deserve—

In the Puranas, there is a cure for everything.

bees in Indian love poetry are said to form the bowstring of the god of lust and to plunge deep inside the flowers that ooze with sap even as the rutting elephant's temples ooze with musk.

The emotional involvement, the pity, desire, and compassion of the bhakti gods causes them to forget that they are above it all, as metaphysics demands, and reduces them to the human level, as mythology demands.

As a rough rule, it seems that writers fall into two camps. There are those who delight in rousting the truth from its concealment amid pieties and convention. If they must strip-mine the world to expose its hypocrisy, they will do so, even if they leave a landscape barren of hope. Then there are those writers who prefer to remythologize life on earth, finding it rich with strange congruences and possibilities.

D. T. Suzuki, the eminent scholar of Zen Buddhism, one day made this sarcastic comment on the Christian tradition to his friends, American mythologist Joseph Campbell and psychoanalyst Carl Jung: "Nature against Man, Man against Nature; God against Man, Man against God; God against Nature, Nature against God; very funny religion!

The mythology of your culture hums in your ears so constantly that no one pays the slightest bit of attention to it. Of course man is conquering space and the atom and the deserts and the oceans and the elements. According to your mythology, this is what he was BORN to do.

Stories of a mythical angel paradise called an Angelopolis are like Peter Pan's Never Never Land.

Sober, for Gods' sake? Fight sober? Jotnar think that's unmanly. That's worse cheating than using far-sight!

Après l'âge des légendes vient l'âge des ténèbres. Comme un fÅ"tus qui évolue. Puis vient l'âge de la sagesse – bien que certains mondes ne parviennent jamais à sortir de l'âge des ténèbres.

tous les mondes ne suivent pas le même chemin, mais l'apparition du langage précède toujours l'âge des légendes. L'apparition de l'écriture marque sa fin. Wallie

I said, 'Do you know what shoulder blades are for?' She giggled. 'Do you not even know that?' she said. 'Do you?' 'It's a proven fact, common knowledge. They're where your wings were, and where they'll grow again.

Odin One Eye," she said as she dialed. "The god of war and magic.

Jews are somehow both sub-human and humanity's secret masters. And it's this racist mythology that's in the air when the left pause before putting Jews into their sacred circle.

This is the fairytale of my life, the mythology of my existence, and, as I only have one story to tell, there is only one way to tell it. You may find it a little melodramatic at moments and you may not like who I was at times. But, princes frequently start out as frogs and, perhaps, by the time I reach my end, you will understand why. And so, as we all must have a beginning, a middle and an end, I will start at the beginning. Once upon a time...

Any attempt to fix it in place, to say for instance "this is the final word on what Moby Dick means" robs myth of its creativity and turns its ossified corpse into dogma.

in Plutarch's account of the birth of Alexander the Great, mother Olympias got pregnant from a snake; it was announced by a bolt of lightning that sealed her womb so that her husband Philip could not have sex with her.

A myth is a religion in which no one any longer believes.

according to Native American legends, dogs with different-colored eyes could see both heaven and earth.

The woman with the horned helmet—who had to be of Viking descent—spoke.

Cerebos, the three-headed guardian of Hell.

Incidentally, one has to be very careful with that 'Bridegroom' imagery. It is so very apt to land one in Male and Female Principles, Eleusis, and the womb of the Great Mother. And that sort of thing doesn't make much appeal to well-balanced women, who look on it as just another example of men's hopeless romanticism about sex, and who are apt either to burst out laughing or sniff a faint smell of drains.