Quotes About Myth

The myth that we must have "time"—more time—in order to create is a myth that keeps us from using the time we do have. If we are forever yearning for "more," we are forever discounting what is offered.

if I had enough time" is the unstated sentence "to hear myself think." In other words, we imagine that if we had time we would quiet our more shallow selves and listen to a deeper flow of inspiration. Again, this is a myth that lets us off the hook—if I wait for enough time to listen, I don't have to listen now, I don't have to take responsibility for being available to what is trying to bubble up today.

The myth that we must have time - more time - in order to create is a myth that keeps us from using the time we do have. If we are forever yearning for more, we are forever discounting what is offered.

Religion decays, the icon remains; a narrative is forgotten, yet its representation still magnetizes.

For the point is this: not that myth refers us back to some original event which has been fancifully transcribed as it passed through collective memory; but that it refers us forward to something that will happen, that must happen. Myth will become reality, however sceptical we might be.

For a moment in time she'd expected his narrative to end the way Cinderella's story had, and not the way a Greek myth would.

A wonder tale can be truer than true, I said. I had learned (...) that the deepest kind of truth can be found in the strangest and wildest of stories. One may not meet a fire-breathing dragon on the way to the well. One may not encounter an army of toothed snakes in the woodshed. That does not make the wisdom in those tales any less real.

Even the most made up of stories has its roots in the truth. That one more so than many.

The world's full of strange things. Stuff that doesn't make sense until you really think about it. Happenings like the ones in the old tales.

dream interpretation were ways of converting our little personal miseries into big robust myths

True believers aren't real receptive to the idea that what they're telling you is just mythology.

Aber sie halten es für eine Legende!' 'Weil sie es dafür halten wollen. Vielleicht würden sich manche Märchen und Mythen als wahr herausstellen, wenn nur jemand den Mut aufbrächte, in einem Brunnen nach einer goldenen Kugel zu suchen oder die Dornenhecke vor einem Schloss zu zerschneiden.

Like science and technology, mythology, as we shall see, is not about opting out of this world, but about enabling us to live more intensely within it.

a novel, like a myth or any great work of art, can become an initiation that helps us to make a painful rite of passage from one phase of life, one state of mind, to another. A novel, like a myth, teaches us to see the world differently; it shows us how to look into our own hearts and to see our world from a perspective that goes beyond our own self-interest.

A myth, therefore, is true because it is effective, not because it gives us factual information. If, however, it does not give us new insight into the deeper meaning of life, it has failed.

There is a linguistic connection between the three words "myth," "mysticism" and "mystery." All are derived from the Greek verb musteion: to close the eyes or the mouth. All three words, therefore, are rooted in an experience of darkness and silence.

There is also a widespread assumption that the Bible is supposed to provide us with role models and give us precise moral teaching, but this was not the intention of the biblical authors. The Eden story is certainly not a morality tale; like any paradise myth, it is an imaginary account of the infancy of the human race.

You cannot be a hero unless you are prepared to give up everything; there is no ascent to the heights without a prior descent into darkness, no new life without some form of death. Throughout our lives, we all find ourselves in situations in which we come face to face with the unknown, and the myth of the hero shows us how we should behave. We all have to face the final rite of passage, which is death.

Like any human idea, the notion of God can be exploited and abused. The myth of a Chosen People and a divine election has often inspired a narrow, tribal theology from the time of the Deuteronomist right up to the Jewish, Christian and Muslim fundamentalism that is unhappily rife in our own day.

The conviction that religion must be rigorously excluded from political life has been called the charter myth of the sovereign nation-state.

Aristotle's account of the Katharsis of tragedy was a philosophic presentation of a truth that Homo religiosus had always understood intuitively: a symbolic, mythical or ritual presentation of events that would be unendurable in daily life can redeem and transform them into something pure and even pleasurable.

Like the Babylonians, the Aryans were quite aware that their myths were not factual accounts of reality but expressed a mystery that not even the gods themselves could explain adequately. When they tried to imagine how the gods and the world had evolved from primal chaos, they concluded that nobody—not even the gods—could understand the mystery of existence:

A myth has been well described as something that in some sense happened once—but that also happens all the time. It is about timeless, universal truth. If

You ever worked with Wookiees?" The commandos shook their heads, wide-eyed. "Well, everything you've heard is true.