Quotes About Myth

This kind of event is so rare as to be the stuff of myth. Modern science has never managed to verify that it has ever truly occurred. Ever! And yet we have just witnessed not just one instance, but two. Two! And both happening at the exact moment when we were in the middle of...

But Medea is neither an anthropological retelling of myth in the style of Mary Renault, nor a simpleminded story of men-versus-women, of a sensuous moon-and-earth religion versus a cold and abstract sky theology. It is a study of power, and of the operations of power, and of the behavior of human beings under pressure when power squeezes them tight.

Over the years, certain stories in the history of family take hold. They're passes from generation to generation, gaining substance and meaning along the way. You have to learn to sift through them, separating fact from conjecture, the likely form the implausible. Here is what I know: Sometimes the least believable stories are the true ones.

It's small wonder that humans dream in myth and in art about other worlds, because we all have the experience of inhabiting one world and, as we are taught language, of walking through a door into another. Even physicists are obsessed with the idea of a multiverse. But we already live in one.

There is a myth, sometimes widespread, that a person need only do inner work…that a man is entirely responsible for his own problems; and that to cure himself, he need only change himself….The fact is, a person is so formed by his surroundings, that his state of harmony depends entirely on his harmony with his surroundings.

Everyone knows they're only stories. Mermaids aren't real: they're a legend. As long as humans believe that, Ingo is safe.

indeed the idea of a "judeo-masonic-bolshevik" conspiracy against "eternal Christian Spain" was one of the Franco regime's founding myths.22

Legends die hard. They survive as truth rarely does.

and this ability of hawks to cross borders that humans cannot is a thing far older than Celtic myth, older than Orpheus – for in ancient shamanic traditions right across Eurasia, hawks and falcons were seen as messengers between this world and the next.

What makes someone mythic is not whether or not he lived, or lived well, but whether or not he was larger than life. Mythic heroes were – and are – outrageous and outstanding. They are phenomenal. They distil some collective ideal or fantasy. That's why we can speak of 'the myth of John Lennon', but not 'the myth of John Major'. And it's also why Theseus made it and Lycurgus didn't.

Responding to myth often means wearing blinkers. Myth is a complex game of production and reception that involves selecting some parts of a narrative and suppressing others. As we shall see later on, this process of communication is not always easily controlled.

If 'myth' is a slippery term, so is 'classical'. It is common shorthand for 'ancient Greek and Roman'. But this shorthand has a history, and a bias.

Reading myth as crystallizing historical fact was a common approach in the 19th and early 20th centuries. But it is an approach to myth that is fraught with problems. It ignores or takes insufficient account of how mythic narratives are exploited for political purposes.

Scholars have produced as many definitions of myth as there are myths themselves. This book will discuss various definitions of myth as it goes along, but it is interested in myth as a process as much as a thing.

Of all the myths surrounding academic writing, the fallacy of effortless productivity is among the most persistent.

MYTH It's not possible to learn how to be a dynamic leader. TRUTH Leadership presence can be cultivated and is available to me.

you've heard that some people at work do more creative work, are more productive, work better as a team, or add more value to a client under pressure. But it's not true. Moreover

Sweden is still a very peaceful country to live in. I think that people in Britain have created this mythology about Sweden, that it's a perfect democratic society full of erotically charged girls.

Nothing disappears completely ... In space, what came earlier continues to underpin what follows ... Pre-existing space underpins not only durable spatial arrangements, but also representational spaces and their attendant imagery and mythic narratives.

Pseudodoxia Epidemica

China produced no religious themes in the Western sense at all. The Chinese never generated a myth of cosmic creation.

God is a Republican, and Santa Claus is a Democrat.

Legend a lie that has attained the dignity of age.

History is the myth, the true myth, of man's fall made manifest in time.