Quotes About Myth

There is no mystery. Truth is here - always present. Mystery is in the mind and mind is a myth.

Count Hermann Keyserling once said truly that the greatest American superstition was belief in facts.

The belief that myths are somehow less true than the symbolic dream we call 'reality' may be the greatest myth of all.

In India we never distinguished between history and myth. Our Puranas as well as Itihasas contain fantastical tales. They are lies that convey deeper truths.

I am not interested in deconsecrating: this is a fashion I hate, it is petit-bourgeois. I want to reconsecrate things as much as possible, I want to re-mythicize them.

Myth does not want to be interpreted in cosmological terms but in anthropological terms or, better, in existentialist terms.

The Old West is not a certain place in a certain time, it's a state of mind. It's whatever you want it to be.

The real truth about a lot of life's mysteries can be explained by science but people don't want to get in bed with science because it's cold. They prefer religion, myth, drama.

Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, The Myth of Freedom and the Way of Meditation. Shambhala: Boston, 1976

Tubman: Myth, Memory and History. Duke University Press: Durham, NC, 2007

Half of tradition is a lie.

There are always the simple events of your life that you might try to convert into legend.

Virgins can't die. Their hymens are like armor.

This is the way werewolf stories go. Never any proof. Just a story that keeps changing, like it's twisting back on itself, biting its own stomach to chew the poison out.

His mother called such people ignorant and superstitious, but his father only shook his head slowly and puffed his pipe and said that sometimes old stories had a grain or two of truth in them and it was best not to take chances. It was why, he said, he crossed himself whenever a black cat crossed his path.

We wanted something in which to believe, as many people on Earth once believed in demons, or in sunken lost continents, in a face on Mars, crop circles, visitations from being on other planets, or God, Buddha, Christ, Allah, and so on. The fact that all of the above were total nonsense didn't change the desire to believe that there was Something Else out there, something that could make sense of chaotic lives and events.

so we have no evidence to support another fantasy, namely that the city of Mekness (in Morocco) was founded by a Scot called MacNess.

Arthur was simply there in their midst, the sword in his hand.

And the Wise Emrys said that Arthur would yet come again to lead his own.

That Arthur has not always existed seems odd to me. Like the wind on the moors and the wild winter stars, surely he has always lived . . . and always will.

A man with a mouth like a mastiff, a brow like a mountain and eyes like burning anthracite that was Dan'l Webster in his prime. And the biggest case he argued never got written down in the books, for he argued it against the devil, nip and tuck and no holds barred. And this is the way I used to hear it told.

This tale is not true: you [Helen] did not even board the well-benched ships, and you did not go to the citadel of Troy.

This, it would turn out, is the main thing we had in common: a susceptibility to the brassy escapism of myth.

The greatest enemy of truth is often not the lie—deliberate, contrived and dishonest—but the myth—persistent, persuasive and unrealistic.