Quotes About Myth

For it depended entirely on me as to whether the myth of the mountain was to be transformed and the path found between the supernatural and reality. It was in me that all expectations were vested.

In myth, violent death is always justified.

There is no culture without a tomb and no tomb without a culture; in the end the tomb is the first and only cultural symbol. The above-ground tomb does not have to be invented. It is the pile of stones in which the victim of the unanimous stoning is buried. It is the first pyramid.

Les mythes débutent presque toujours par un état de désordre extrême.

The world's myths do not reveal a way to interpret the Gospels, but exactly the reverse: the Gospels reveal to us the way to interpret myth.

Human culture is fundamentally and originally religious, rather than secondarily and supplementally.

intellectual…and even religious.

The resistance to the mimetic contagion prevents the myth from taking shape. The conclusion in the light of the Gospels is inescapable: myths are the voice of communities that unanimously surrender to the mimetic contagion of victimization.

If the Gospels were mythical themselves, they could not provide the knowledge that demythologizes mythology.

Markus Müller, "Interview with René Girard," Anthropoetics 2, no. 1 (June 1996): 3–5. 2

la dialectique contient souvent chez lui [Platon] une certaine part de « jeu », ce qui est très conforme à la mentalité grecque, mais, quand il l'abandonne pour le mythe, on peut être sûr que le jeu a cessé et qu'il s'agit de choses ayant en quelque façon un caractère « sacré ».

What if we are all capable of lying to ourselves? But the story didn't bother Naomi. Instead it reassured her confirming that the stories we tell ourselves have more meaning than the facts. That doesn't make them lies. Seeded with every myth was the emotional truth.

most people in the ancient world, did not make a sharp distinction between myth and reality. The two were intimately tied together in their spiritual experience. That is to say, they were less interested in what actually happened , than in what it meant . It would have been perfectly normal, indeed expected, for a writer in the ancient world, to tell tales of gods and heroes, whose fundamental facts would have been recognized as false, but whose underlying message would have been seen as true.

Lucky Devon Pixies, said the sign. I'm a lucky Devon pixie, from the legend old and true, Kiss me once and turn me twice and I'll bring luck to you. The pixies were silver charms in pretty little boxes with the verse on the lid,

El padre Blas Valera (cuzqueño) dice que cuando cantaban los gallos, los indios creían que lloraban por la muerte del inca, por lo cual llamaron al gallo hualpa.

De todos modos el destino había empezado a armar su trama, a tejer su intriga, a anudar en un punto los hilos sueltos de aquello que los antiguos griegos han llamado el muthos.

Which was briefly reassuring, until some biomedical statistician from the University of fucking Buzzkill went on record about the myth of the perfect failsafe,

Almost nothing is known about Homer, which explains why so much has been written about him.

The Kennedy brothers seemed neither as grand and omniscient as the "court histories" that sprang up after the president's assassination portrayed them, nor as cunning and shameless as later books, such as Seymour Hersh's The Dark Side of Camelot, argued. They were both self-creative and self-destructive.

These virtuosi maintained that whatever has been believed by everyone, always and everywhere, is likely to be untrue.

The Bible should be taught, but emphatically not as reality. It is fiction, myth, poetry, anything but reality. As such it needs to be taught because it underlies so much of our literature and our culture.

I suppose if you look back to your early childhood you accept everything people tell you, and that includes a heavy dose of irrationality - you're told about tooth fairies and Father Christmas and things.

It is at the heart of the vampire myth. The vampire is dead but also brings death. Because vampires are dead, they are pale, cadaverous, white. They bring themselves a kind of life by sucking the blood of the living, and at such points may appear flushed with red, the colour of life: Hammer

Behind every legend, strange to say, can be found a kernel of truth, a group of facts around which the legend was built.