Quotes About Myth

I varje saga finns ett korn av sanning.

There's Merlin. And Morgana. But Morgana is evil.' 'And Merlin?' 'Average.

People"—Geralt turned his head—"like to invent monsters and monstrosities. Then they seem less monstrous themselves.

There's a grain of truth in every fairy tale

Un voyage du pays du roi Ubu au pays du vampire Dracula ne peut pas renfermer de souvenirs auxquels on puisse croire plus tard, comment on croit, par exemple, à l'existence de Paris, de Stonehenge ou de la place Saint-Marc. (p. 22)

People are alive by means of the circulation of the spirit and the movement of the cosmos. Without those we couldn't even be alive. And the systems of our world—academics, science, education, medicine, culture, and civilization—all are manifestations of this spirit but also of the current myths or cosmology that we are living. And these are what we must go beyond.

The problem was that somewhere along the way I had bought into the myth that a good leader has to be good at everything. So I operated under the assumption that I had to upgrade my weaknesses into strengths. After all, who would follow a leader who wasn't well-rounded?

Too many church leaders have bought into the myth that to clarify the win means establishing attendance goals and raising a lot of money.

Mother goddesses are just as silly a notion as father gods. If a revival of the myths of these cults gives woman emotional satisfaction, it does so at the price of obscuring the real conditions of life. This is why they were invented in the first place." - Angela Carter (1940-1992)

All artists, they say, are a little mad. This madness is, to a certain extent, a self-created myth designed to keep the generality away from the phenomenally close-knit creative community. Yet, in the world of the artists, the consciously eccentric are always respectful and admiring if those who have the courage to be genuinely a little mad.

They say there's an ointment the Devil gives you that turns you into a wolf the minute you rub it on.

Because she is the channel of life, woman as mythic mother lives at one remove from life. A woman who defines herself through her fertility has no other option. So a woman who feels she has been deprived of motherhood is trebly deprived—of children; of the value of herself as mother; and of her own self, as autonomous being.

Mother goddesses are just as silly a notion as father gods. If a revival of the myths of these cults gives woman emotional satisfaction, it does so at the price of obscuring the real conditions of life. This is why they were invented in the first place.

It is a myth that rape is an inevitable part of conflict . . . There is nothing inevitable about it. It is a weapon of war aimed at civilians. It has nothing to do with sex —everything to do with power. It is done to torture and humiliate innocent people and often very young children.

We are told not to leave food on the table overnight: it draws the dead.

It is perilous to live past the end of your myth

Pretty much every society, every culture in the world has some version of the Arthur legend, so everybody knows it; certainly in the western world, everybody knows King Arthur, but nobody knows what happens next.

Well documented, the relationship of literature to myth in the Western world has undergone much change over the millennia, as first the age of gods fell away before the notion of a single god, and then, for many people, that single god slipped away, too.

We're not nearly as violent as the westerns.

What Westerns did was to take a world and mythologise it.

Now, of course, the great thing about the solar system as a frontier is that there are no Indians, so you can have all the glory of the myth of the American westward expansion without any of the guilt.

Eighteenth-century matrons would have never have dreamed of appointing a redhaired wet nurse for their precious offspring - redheads passed on their horrible characters through their milk.

What if the Soviet intervention was a blessing in disguise? It saved the myth that if the Soviets were not to intervene, there would have been some flowering authentic democratic socialism and so on. I'm a little bit more of a pessimist there. I think that the Soviets - it's a very sad lesson - by their intervention, saved the myth.

All human beings have an innate need to hear and tell stories and to have a story to live by. religion, whatever else it has done, has provided one of the main ways of meeting this abiding need.