Quotes About Myth

the All is everywhere, and anywhere may become the seat of power. Any blade of grass may assume, in myth, the figure of the savior and conduct the questing wanderer into the sanctum sanctorum of his own heart.

The images of Myth are reflections of Spiritual and Depth potentialities of every one of us. Through contemplating those we evoke those powers in our own lives to operate through ourselves.

Myth must be kept alive. The people who can keep it alive are the artists of one kind or another. The function of the artist is the mythologization of the environment and the world.

The happy ending of the fairy tale, the myth, and the divine comedy of the soul is to be read, not as a contradiction, but as a transcendence of the universal tragedy of man. The objective world remains what it was, but, because of a shift of emphasis within the subject, is beheld as though transformed.

If myth is translated into literal fact, then myth is a lie. But if you read it as a reflection of the world inside you, then it's true. Myth is the penultimate truth.

Every religion is true one way or another. It is true when understood metaphorically. But when it gets stuck to its own metaphors, interpreting them as facts, then you are in trouble.

A mythological image that has to be explained to the brain is not working.

And what it [a future myth] will have to deal with will be exactly what all myths have dealt with – the maturation of the individual, from dependency through adulthood, through maturity, and then to he exit; and then how to relate to this society and how to relate this society to the world of nature and the cosmos.

If you're going to have a story, have a big story, or none at all.

The happy ending of the fairy tale, the myth, and the divine comedy of the soul, is to be read, not as a contradiction, but as a transcendence of the universal tragedy of man.

A ritual is the enactment of a myth.

CAMPBELL: I think of mythology as the homeland of the muses, the inspirers of art, the inspirers of poetry. To see life as a poem and yourself participating in a poem is what the myth does for you.

The myth is not my own; I have it from my mother. Euripides

Wherever the poetry of myth is interpreted as biography, history or science, it is killed. The living images become only remote facts of a distant time or sky.

You changed the definition of a myth from the search for meaning to the experience of meaning. CAMPBELL: Experience of life.

Myth helps you to put your mind in touch with this experience of being alive.

If you are going to have a story, have a big story, or none at all.

the single hero story that seemed to be repeating itself everywhere — in the oldest Sumerian epics, in folktales from the Pacific Islands and the Siberian forests and the African savannah, in the lives of great religious heroes like Gautama ?akyam?ni and Jesus, in the case notes of psychiatric patients

The hero, the waker of his own soul, is himself but the convenient means of his own dissolution.

myth is the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into the human cultural manifestation

Dream is the personalized myth, myth the depersonalized dream; both myth and dream are symbolic in the same general way of the dynamics of the psyche. But in the dream the forms are quirked by the peculiar troubles of the dreamer, whereas in myth the problems and solutions shown are directly valid for all mankind.

Our own poor poets, I am afraid, have been so intimidated by our clinics and laboratories that they have abandoned the first principles of beginning, that of the festival; and the heart of the festival has always been the atmosphere of myth, of delight.

Dream is the personalized myth, myth is the depoersonalized dream; both myth and dream are symbolic in the same general way of the dynamics of the psyche.

A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.[6