Quotes About Myth

In old times the lady-bird was believed to live in the sun, and the German children still have a rhyme telling it to fly away up to heaven and bring back the sunshine; and they believe that if they were to kill one of these insects the sun would not shine the next day.

Classics are books that everybody talks about, and nobody reads.

The stereotype is that a poet shoots his load at 25 years old and goes around the rest of his life doddering.

The poem is, then, a little myth of man's capacity for making life meaningful. And in the end, the poem is not a thing we see — it is, rather, a light by which we may see — and what we see is life.

The modern superstition is that we're free of superstition.

And there's no saying what heady potions we won't concoct, what meanings, myths, manias we won't imbibe in order to convince ourselves that reality is not an empty vessel.

I believed, as so many people do, that it is possible to exercise more and eat less and keep it up for a lifetime. That's the conventional wisdom, and it's the biggest lie in health.

According to an ancient Sardinian legend, the bodies of those who are born on Christmas Eve will never dissolve into dust but are preserved until the end of time.

The For Dummies title refers to the humility required in approaching Tolkien's complex myth, not to the level of insight herein.

Remember: King Kong died for your sins.

Where I'm from, we believe in all sorts of things that aren't true... we call it history.

Because the myth that America is a Christian nation has led many to associate America with Christ, many now hear the good news of Jesus only as American news, capitalistic news, imperialistic news, exploitive news, antigay news, or Republican news. And whether justified or not, many people want nothing to do with any of it.

But the myth of power is, of course, a very powerful myth, and probably most people in this world more or less believe in it. It is a myth, which, if everybody believes in it, becomes to that extent self-validating. But it is still epistemological lunacy and leads inevitably to various sorts of disaster.

Manifest Destiny, depicted in paintings as an angelic woman in a diaphanous white gown floating serenely, yet watchfully, over the immigrants heading west, was quite a bitch in reality. Anyone not under her wing and not part of the American vision was going to be trampled. Those outside the fold were manifestly destined to be nailed.

Where I'm from, we believe in all sorts of things that aren't true... we call it history.

For Trisha The truth's in myth not fact, a story fragment or an act that lasts and stands for all: how bees made honey in a skull.

We make the oldest stories new when we succeed, and we are trapped by the old stories when we fail.

the Arthurian material was never merely 'legends'; it was a myth—a timeless, universal story with many meanings.

All geniuses die young.

Western spiritual seekers began picking and choosing from Eastern philosophies based on their preferences. Wanting to get away from myth and dogma, they mixed and matched, shook and stirred, mashed and meshed, blended and juiced . . . and in the process, well, they lost their way. They created a number of philosophical inconsistencies.

One myth that has become established in the self-development arena is that it only takes 21 days to form a new habit. This simply isn't true in all cases. Sometimes it takes a shorter time, sometimes a longer time, and sometimes old habits are so hard to break that new ones never take hold.

Any legend, any creature, any symbol we ever stumble on, already exists in a vast cosmic reservoir where archetypes wait. Shapes looming outside our Platonic cave. We naturally believe ourselves clever and wise, so advanced, and those who came before us so naïve and simple…when all we truly do is echo the order of the universe, as it guides us…

Nora said, "I thought vampires drank virgin blood. They hypnotize…they turn into bats…" Setrakian said, "They are much romanticized. But the truth is more…how should I say?" "Perverse," said Eph. "Disgusting," said Nora.

Or maybe the labyrinth had been built just for this purpose—to have them all play their part in a story written once upon a time and long ago.