Quotes About Myth

We know that to give writing its future, it is necessary to overthrow the myth: the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.

I myself cannot construct my love story to the end. I am its poet (its bard) only for the beginning; the end, like my own death, belongs to others; it is up to them to write the fiction, the external, mythic narrative.

Myth does not deny thing, on the contrary, its function is to talk about them; simply, it purifies them, it makes them innocent, it gives them a natural and eternal justification, it gives them a clarity which is not that of an explanation but of a statement of fact.

This is why myth is experienced as innocent speech: not because its intentions are hidden—if they were hidden, they could not be efficacious—but because they are naturalised.

But when a myth reaches the entire community, it is from the latter than the mythologist must become estranged if he wants to liberate the myth.

either the intention of the myth is too obscure to be efficacious, or it is too clear to be believed. In either case, where is the ambiguity? This is but a false dilemma. Myth hides nothing and flaunts nothing: it distorts; myth is neither a lie nor a confession: it is an inflexion. […] driven to having either to unveil or to liquidate the concept, it will naturalize it. We reach here the very principle of myth: it transforms history into nature.

Myth, on the contrary, is a language which does not want to die: it wrests from the meanings which give it its sustenance an insidious, degraded survival, it provokes in them an artificial reprieve in which it settles comfortably, it turns them into speaking corpses.

A conjuring trick has taken place; it has turned reality inside out, it has emptied it of history and has filled it with nature, it has removed from things their human meaning so as to make them signify a human insignificance. The function of myth is to empty reality: it is, literally , a ceaseless flowing out, a haemorrhage, or perhaps an evaporation, in short a perceptible absence

Le mythe est une parole choisie par l'histoire : il ne saurait surgir de la « nature » des choses.

one can conceive of very ancient myths, but there are no eternal ones; for it is human history which converts reality into speech, and it alone rules the life and the death of mythical language. Ancient or not, mythology can only have an historical foundation, for myth is a type of speech chosen by history…

Myth and utopia: the origins have belonged, the future will belong to the subjects in whom there is something feminine.

Historiquement, le discours de l'absence est tenu par la Femme : la Femme est sédentaire, l'Homme est chasseur, voyageur; la Femme est fidèle (elle attend), l'homme est coureur (il navigue, il drague). C'est la Femme qui donne forme à l'absence, en élabore la fiction, car elle en a le temps ; (…)

Rockefeller handled people adroitly and wasn't the cold curmudgeon of later myth.

The danger in holding on to a myth is that it becomes like a religion we've stopped believing in. It no longer instructs us; it only stultifies is. And besides, what do we want with a myth that makes us into people we don't want to be?

Fiction comprises stories about things that never happened to people who didn't exist.

It had been everything he had dreamed it would be, multiplied by a million. She wasn't a myth. She was a living breathing creature, hard and strong and sinewy and perfumed, warm and shy and giving.

In the tall tales told by firelight there was always a brief and laconic conversation.

Is it hubris to believe we all live epics?

a wish is not a fact. Even by proving that a certain view is indispensable for living well, one proves merely that the view in question is a salutary myth: one does not prove it to be true. Utility and truth are two entirely different things.

In this connection it should be mentioned that in describing the regimes, Socrates does not speak of "ideologies" belonging to them; he is concerned with the character of each kind of regime and with the end which it manifestly and explicitly pursues, as well as with the political justification of the end in question in contradistinction to any transpolitical justification stemming from cosmology, theology, metaphysics, philosophy of history, myth, and the like.

Ritual, art, poesy, drama, music, dance, philosophy, science, myth, religion are all as essential to man as his daily bread: man's true life consists not alone in the work activities that directly sustain him, but in the symbolic activities which give significance both to the processes of work and their ultimate products and consummations.

Oh shit! Can you say 'fuck' in a graveyard or will it jinx you with the undead?

And farther still, in the vast prairies mythologized in the American mind, a figure stood shadowed in the dark, biding his time, a scarecrow awaiting harvest.

Just because I believe in science doesn't mean I ignore superstition. Sometimes there's a basis for those superstitions.