Quotes About Myth

It was only in the fairy tales that people were called upon to be so brave, to die for one another. Not in real-life Denmark.

Lakewalker legends say the gods abandoned the world when the first malice came. And that they will return when the earth is entirely cleansed of its spawn. If you believe in gods. Do you? I believe they are not here, yes. It's a faith of sorts.

We may never know the true story behind the book, but the book has become a myth, and myth is truer than history.

They came as quietly as rain, and went away like mists drifting. There were jests about them and songs. And the songs outlasted the jests. At last they became a legend, which haunted those farms for ever: they were spoken of when men told of hopeless quests, and held up to laughter or glory, whichever men had to give. And

THE OLD MAN with a hammer and the one-eyed man with a spear

Tears, she had once been told, were designed to eliminate toxins, and they poured down her face and slimed her neck and gathered in the recesses of her collarbones and she had to be careful never to lie back and let them get into her ears, which might cause the toxins to return and start over. Of course, the rumor of toxins turned out not to be true. Tears were quite pure.

The self-anointed superior races, drunk on Darwin and nationalist hyperbole, besotted with eugenics and beguiled by myth, were winding up machines of genocide that soon would be unleashed upon a world already weary to the heart of such infinite foolery and contemptible vainglory.

The idea that the world was flat was never put forth by a seafaring man. It was a tale told to landsmen, or to merchants who might be inclined to compete for markets, for in those days the source of raw material was closely guarded.

A lot of people don't believe in curses. A lot of people don't believe in yellow-spotted lizards either. But if one bites you, it doesn't make a difference whether you believe in it or not.

Myth is history in a masquerade costume. Peel away the fantastical facade, and you will always find a core of truth. Adrien Morel

If there is in this world a well-attested account, it is that of vampires. Nothing is lacking: official reports, affidavits of well-known people, of surgeons, of priests, of magistrates; the judicial proof is most complete. And with all that, who is there who believes in vampires?

The United States is not unique among nations in forging an origin myth, but most of its citizens believe it to be exceptional among nation-states, and this exceptionalist ideology has been used to justify appropriation of the continent and then domination of the rest of the world.

Reconciling empire and liberty - based on the violent taking of Indigenous lands - into a usable myth allowed for the emergence of an enduring populist imperialism. Wars of conquest and ethnic cleansing could be sold to the people - indeed could be fought for by the young men of those very people - by promising to expand economic opportunity, democracy, and freedom for all.

Awareness of the settler-colonialist context of US history writing is essential if one is to avoid the laziness of the default position and the trap of a mythological unconscious belief in manifest destiny. The

The publication arc of the Leatherstocking Tales parallels the Jackson presidency. For those who consumed the books in that period and throughout the nineteenth century—generations of young white men—the novels became perceived fact, not fiction, and the basis for the coalescence of US American nationalism.

affinities under the crust of colonialism. This brief overview of precolonial North America suggests the magnitude of what was lost to all humanity and counteracts the settler-colonial myth of the wandering Neolithic hunter.

this idea of the gift-giving Indian helping to establish and enrich the development of the United States is an insidious smoke screen meant to obscure the fact that the very existence of the country is a result of the looting of an entire continent and its resources.

If we persist in distinguishing and holding apart myth and history, we are in danger of missing the story's own sense of truth.

In those days of the second World War it was still widely believed that women who had just delivered could reasonably be expected to be off their heads. 'Yes, dear,' these meek women said, with a certain mournful importance. 'I was outa me mind. Terrible, really. All me milk went to the brain. I suppose it curdles, like.

Here is an oral tradition, legends passed from mouth to mouth, a communal myth created invariably at the base of the mango tree in the evening's profound darkness, in which only the trembling voices of old men resound, because the women and children are silent, raptly listening. That is what the evening hour is so important: it is the time when the community contemplates what it is and whence it came.

Here is an oral tradition, legends passed from mouth to mouth, a communal myth created invariably at the base of the mango tree in the evening's profound darkness, in which only the trembling voices of old men resound, because the women and children are silent, raptly listening. That is why the evening hour is so important: it is the time when the community contemplates what it is and whence it came.

Stories are all we humans have to make us immortal.

A people that has remained convinced of its greatness and invulnerability, that has chosen to believe such a myth in the face of all the evidence, is a people in the grip of a kind of sleep, or madness.

everything is relative, one man's absolute belief is another man's fairy tale;