Quotes About Myth

Classical heroes are usually much larger than life. They're not quite human beings. They're somehow larger than human scale.

In every one of the Greeks' mythology tales, there is this: a man chasing a woman, or a woman chasing a man. There is never a meeting in the middle.

He is my unicorn, though... That's how I felt falling in love with him, as if I'd found a creature of myth.

Deci mutatia a avut loc în epoca — mitica sau nu, putin îmi pasa, eu, ca om de stiinta, nu ma las impresionat de cuvinte — a avut loc în epoca imediat urmatoare izgonirii din Paradis. Pedeapsa de care vorbeste capitolul III din cartea Genezei aceasta a fost: amnezia. Corpul omenesc a uitat pur si simplu ca fusese înzestrat cu o functiune capitala: autoregenerarea celulelor...

Symbolic thinking is not the exclusive privilege of the child, of the poet or of the unbalanced mind: it is consubstantial with human existence, it comes before language and discursive reason. The symbol reveals certain aspects of reality – the deepest aspects – which defy any other means of knowledge. Images, symbols and myths are not irresponsible creations of the psyche; they respond to a need and fulfil a function, that of bringing to light the hidden modalities of being.

Mircea Eliade

For the historian of religions, every manifestation of the sacred is important: every rite, every myth, every belief or divine figure reflects the experience of the sacred and hence implies the notions of being, of meaning, and of truth ... In short, the sacred is an element in the structure of consciousness and not a stage in the history of consciousness.

It is probable that the Phoenician version of the myth of divine sovereignty derives from, or was strongly influenced by, the Hurrian myth. We may presume that Hesiod made use of the same tradition, known in Greece either through the Phoenicians or directly from the Hittites.

There are at least four Sumerian narratives that explain the origin of man. They are so different that we must assume a plurality of traditions. One myth relates that the first human beings sprouted from the ground like the plants. According to another version, man was fashioned from clay by certain divine artisans; then the goddess Nammu modeled a heart for him, and En-ki gave him life.

The myth, like the novel, signifies primarily an autonomous act of creation by the mind.

The myths that projected Jesus of Nazareth into a universe of archetypes and transcendent figures are as "true" as his acts and words; indeed, these myths confirm the strength and creativity of his original message.

But it would be risky to explain so widespread a myth by phenomena of which no geological traces have been found. The majority of the flood myths seem in some sense to form part of the cosmic rhythm: the old world, peopled by a fallen humanity, is submerged under the waters, and some time later a new world emerges from the aquatic "chaos.

The main function of myth is to determine the exemplar models of all ritual, and of all significant human acts.

Myth expresses in action and drama what metaphysics and theology define dialectically.

Myth is an autonomous act of creation by the mind: it is through that act of creation that revelation is brought about – not through the things or events it makes use of.

Myth took the place of objectively conceived history. Myth, Michel Tournier has said, is "history everyone already knows."2 As such, history becomes nothing but a tool of the present, with no integrity whatsoever of its own.

How many things were articles of faith to us yesterday that are fables to us today?

You have spent your whole life believing such untrue things. Don't you know how alone you are, David? We are most alone when we are with the myths.

This was the kind of job that made legends out of hunters. Of course, to be a legend, you generally had to be dead.

It's absolutely not true that we need natural gas, coal or oil—we think it's a myth

He snorted. "He thinks killing a day-old hydra has made him a hero." None of the songs had ever mentioned the Vandalus Hydra being one day old: it diminished the story more than a little.

Our Dragon doesn't eat the girls he takes, no matter what stories they tell outside our valley.

The surgeons are playing on the myth's double standard for the function of the body. A man's thigh is for walking, but a woman's is for walking and looking beautiful. If women can walk but believe our limbs look wrong, we feel that our bodies cannot do what they are meant to do; we feel as genuinely deformed and disabled as the unwilling Victorian hypochondriac felt ill.

Culture stereotypes women to fit the myth by flattening the feminine into beauty-without-intelligence or intelligence-without-beauty; women are allowed a mind or a body but not both.