Quotes About Myth

The myth of their total responsibility arose during postwar trials in the Federal Republic of Germany as a way to protect the majority of German killers and isolate the killing from German society as such.

Still, even when false, legends can be most informative.

Most people outside of America won't get it. It's the Easter bunny. It's another lie and I don't understand why we had to invent this character.

It is the mythic experience, the mythic imagination that opens, reveals depth and mystery, which places the human in the context of the nonhuman, and so, forces retreat, humility, and awe, in the presence of spaces beyond our will.

And we cannot keep our balance. Myth gives way to Reason. Revelation to Orthodoxy. We must dance or go mad.

It is that bizarre thing. If I had kids, I, of course, would tell them there's Santa, but it's also just an odd feeling to be blatantly lying to kids.

People need a narrative, and if there isn't one on offer, they make one up.

Bigfoot does not exist because there would be evidence left behind - hair, feces, bones, kills, offspring, a carcass - if it did.

In L.A., fat people are mythical. We're like Big Foot. 'Oh, yeah, my cousin knows someone who's fat.' Nobody's fat in L.A.

Don't get me started on Americans and war. One of the things I learnt over in Italy is how they mythologised the war so that it's all good old gung-ho guys from Omaha and ignored everyone else's role.

One must not believe any of those mythologies about oneself as an artist.

The main difference between a cat and a lie is that a cat only has nine lives.

I made art a philosophy, and philosophy an art: I altered the minds of men, and the colour of things: I awoke the imagination of my century so that it created myth and legend around me: I summed up all things in a phrase, all existence in an epigram: whatever I touched I made beautiful

She is a monster, without being a myth, which is rather unfair.

Marco Polo had seen the inhabitants of Zipangu place rose-colored pearls in the mouths of the dead. A sea-monster had been enamoured of the pearl that the diver brought to King Perozes, and had slain the thief, and mourned for seven moons over its loss.

The whole of Japan is a pure invention. There is no such country, there are no such people.

I prate of ancient poets' monstrous lies, Ne'er seen or now or then by human eyes.

they cast the stones behind: The stones (a miracle to mortal view, But long tradition makes it pass for true) Did first the rigour of their kind expel, And suppled into softness, as they fell

Christ on a cracker. You raped Achilles!

I've told so many stories about him. For so many years I've been the girl in the legend, the girl in the fairy tale, the girl who sculpted Lincoln. That fame became my prison. It trapped me in myth. I'm not sure I remember the truth anymore...

Follow your heart? Forgive me, but that's the myth of all myths. You should research the man you're with as thoroughly as you'd research which car to buy. What do other people say about him? What's his track record? Be aware of what your situation with

The proper place to start, in order to understand the various things called religion, is in the human capacity to entertain supernatural fantasy. This vast domain of cognition includes daydreaming, fiction, myth, dreams, all produced by what classical psychology would have called the faculty of imagination.

we are here confronted with an irreducible oddity about all human societies: all are strung around figments of the human imagination.

But myth making, as it turns out, is not the sole prerogative of religion. It is also a very active secular and academic pastime—and a human one as well; perhaps it is some kind of human necessity.