Quotes About Mythology

Sisyphus is still there in the halls of Tartarus, pushing that boulder up the hill and getting almost to the top before it rolls back down and he has to start once again.

After all I've done for you? Medea kept her voice steady. 'Who was it who helped you defeat the fire-breathing oven and the great spent of the Grove of Area? Who was it who overcame Talos of Crete...' Yes, yes, yes. But...

We have 18 or 19 plays by Euripides, for example, yet he is known to have written almost 100. Only 7 of Aeschylus's 80 remain, while just 7 plays of Sophocles have come down to us out of 120 known titles. Almost every character you come across when reading the Greek myths had a play about them written by one, other, or all three of the great Athenian masters. The loss of so many of their works might be regarded as the greatest Greek tragedy of them all.

Poseidon presented Amphitrite with the very first dolphin.

This is so similar to the story of Apollo and Hyacinthus that you wonder if some bard somewhere got drunk or confused.

Do "superego" and "id" reveal any more about our inner selves than Apollo and Dionysus? Evolutionary behavioralism and ethology may tell us more about who and how we are as scientific fact, but the poetic concentration of our traits into the personalities of gods, demons, and monsters are easier for some of us dull-witted ones to hold in our heads than the abstractions of science.

Absolutely,' lies Zeus, who has, in common with us all, a horror of hearing the details of anyone else's dreams.

Greeks were the first people to make coherent narratives, a literature even, of their gods, monsters, and heroes.

The poet Hesiod says of Eurynome, in a fragment from the eighth century BC: "A marvelous scent rose from her silvern raiment as she moved, and beauty was wafted from her eyes." No one has ever said anything as wonderful as that about me.

We know how wars that each side believed would soon be decided can stretch out over months and years. The Greeks and Trojans were perhaps the first to discover this unhappy truth.

Given the intervention of the gods and other magical and supernatural happenings, I have—as mentioned in the Introduction that you so wisely skipped—thought it best to tell the story of the war and its aftermath without attempting to dot every sequential iota or cross every chronological tau.

Ignorance of nature's ways led people in ancient times to invent gods to lord it over every aspect of human life.

N VIKING MYTHOLOGY, Skoll and Hati chase the sun and the moon. When the wolves catch either one, there is an eclipse. When this happens, the people on earth rush to rescue the sun or moon by making as much noise as they can in hopes of scaring off the wolves.

The creation accounts of the past now seem less relevant and credible.

The apocalypse never came, and it's not going to come. This idea belongs to the world of ancient mythology, and it wasn't a very good idea to begin with. In it the Jewish God of shalom becomes a violent overlord, and the Prince of Peace becomes a supernatural warrior, a fire-breathing monster who lays waste the earth, its forests, its animals, and all but a remnant of its people -- the chosen few. How many have believed they were the few! (pg. 250)

The Fates and Furies, as well as the Graces and Sirens, glide with linked hands over life.

Oh, did you expect me to play fair?" Cupid laughed. "I am the god of love. I am never fair.

To the Greeks, work was a curse and nothing else. Their name for it—ponos—has the same root as the Latin poena, sorrow

Over the years all these vampire movies have come out and nobody looks like a vampire anymore.

A necessidade, já os gregos o sabiam, é uma deusa não só cega mas também cruel.

I am become Shiva, destroyer of worlds.

Parallels between the veteran's words and Achilles' are inescapable. During berserk rage, the friend is constantly alive; letting go of the rage lets him die.

After Patroklos's death, Achilles -- to use the words of our veterans -- "lost it." When a veteran says he "lost it," what did he lose? What did Achilles lose? I believe that the veterans and Homer shared similar views on this subject. I believe that the veterans' own words, they lost their humanity. Beast-god and god-beast replace human identity.

Ghost Lore among the Tribes of New Guinea and West Sumatra