Quotes About Myth

perhaps a soul is what you have spent your life making, not a piece of metaphysical equipment shipped ready-made from the factory, another myth like original sin, which you were outfitted with at birth and could somehow lose, like men high and low sometimes lost their humanity--

As for the men in power, they are so anxious to establish the myth of infallibility that they do their utmost to ignore truth.

Ordinarily, people are anxious to test their theories in practice, to learn from experience, but those who wield power are so anxious to establish the myth of their own infallibility that they turn back on truth as squarely as they can. Politics mean nothing to me. I don't like people who are indifferent to the truth.

Strange finished: "People have such odd notions about magicians. They wanted me to tell them about vampyres.

Although pigs are generally good-natured, more people are killed each year by pigs than by sharks.

Joseph Campbell reflects in The Power of Myth that in mythic terms, the first part of any journey of initiation must deal with the death of the old self and the resurrection of the new. Campbell says that the hero, or heroic figure, 'moves not into outer space but into inward space, to the place from which all being comes, into the consciousness that is the source of all things, the kingdom of heaven within. The images are outward, but their reflection is inward.

Que estar enamorados era lo único que necesitábamos. Supongo que fue porque, en realidad, nunca pensé que me iba a enamorar de esa forma; y luego está el famoso mito de que cuando te pasa, se supone que vas a vivir feliz por siempre jamás.

You're sexy," she asserted bluntly. "You play it down at work, which I understand and appreciate, but don't waste it. It's a terrible myth that a successful woman can't be sexy without it ruining her credibility. Don't buy into it.

And this is how it stiffens, my vision of that seaside childhood. My father died, we moved inland. Whereon those nine first years of my life sealed themselves off like a ship in a bottle—beautiful, inaccessible, obsolete, a fine, white flying myth.

waited for the flash of green, which I have never seen but some people say exists.

The mere mention of the Farakka Express, which jerks its way eastward each day from Delhi to Calcutta, is enough to throw even a seasoned traveller into fits of apoplexy. At a desert encampment on Namibia's Skeleton Coast, a hard-bitten adventurer had downed a peg of local fire-water then told me the tale. Farakka was a ghost train, he said, haunted by ghouls, Thuggees, and thieves. Only a passenger with a death wish would go anywhere near it.

When people say a knight's job is all glory, I laugh, and laugh, and laugh.

When people tell me a knight's job is all glory, I laugh, and laugh, and laugh," Lord Raoul had once told Kel. "Sometimes I can stop laughing before they edge away and talk about soothing drinks.

Get us to prove to the world that superstition is idiocy and all the demons are dust.

Real life is about accepting ups and downs, the good and the bad, the possibility of failure as well as the ambition to succeed. Atheism speaks to the truth about our human nature because it recognizes all this and does not seek to shield us from the truth by myth and superstition

Isn't biblical Eden an ambivalent symbol? It seems to me that the myth simply shows us that self-awareness and intelligence are perilous. And they can be deadly. But consider the alternative to the Tree of Knowledge. Would anyone want innocence at such a price?

The notion of a Judeo-Christian tradition, he says, is a myth invented by Enlightenment humanists to promote pluralistic social values.

Pero yo te miro de frente porque no te juzgo. No te mato a ti sino a tus actos, al eco de tus actos, su resonar lejano en las costas griegas. Se habla ya tanto de ti que eres como una vasta nube de palabras, un juego de espejos, una reiteración de fábula inasible. Tal es al menos el lenguaje de mis retóricos.

Sólo esa vez, excentrado como un matador mítico para quien matar es devolver el toro al mar y el mar al cielo

Fui tan feliz en aquella ciudad que, cuando me acordaba de ella, la mitificaba como los emigrantes hacen con sus países.

At the origin of every true civilization there lies a "divine" event (every great civilization has its own myth concerning divine founders): thus, no human or naturalistic factor can fully account for it. The adulteration and decline of civilizations is caused by an event of the same order, though it acts in the opposite, degenerative sense.

Stagolee was, undoubtedly and without question, the baddest nigger that ever lived. Stagolee was so bad that the flies wouldn't even fly around his head in the summertime, and snow wouldn't fall on his house in the winter. He was bad, jim.

Everyone warned her that the U.S. was a difficult place where even the Devil got his ass beat

What Hatüey said on the pyre is a legend in itself: Are there white people in Heaven? Then I'd rather go to Hell.)