Quotes About Myth

What's the use of stories that aren't even true?

When we stop believing in the gods we can start believing in their stories.

Roots, I sometimes think, are a conservative myth, designed to keep us in our places.

William the Conqueror, it is said, began by eating a mouthful of English sand.

We know the force of gravity, but not its origins; and to explain why we become attached to our birthplaces we pretend that we are trees and speak of roots. Look under your feet. You will not find gnarled growths sprouting through the soles. Roots, I sometimes think, are a conservative myth, designed to keep us in our places.

Sometimes legends make reality, and become more useful than the facts.

Life's bruises demythologise us all. The earth gapes.

What is the use of stories that arent even true?

On this day Bisnaga moves out of the realm of the fantastic into that of the historical, and the great river of its story flows into the ocean of stories which is the history of the world.

This leaves only two options: disintegration, or a new dictatorship ... no, there is a third, and I shall not be so pessimistic as to deny its possibility. The third option is the substitution of a new myth for the old one. Here are three such myths, all available from stock at short notice: liberty, equality, fraternity.

I am comparing gravity with belonging... Both phenomena observably exist... but neither is understood...We know the force of gravity but not its origins; and to explain how we become attached to our birth places we pretend that we are trees and speak of roots. Look under your feet. You will not find gnarled growths sprouting through the soles. Roots, I sometimes think, are a conservative myth, designed to keep us in our places. -- from Home and Shame

For, as the myths tell us, it is by defying the gods that human beings have best expressed their humanity.

the schismatic convulsion that had gripped America following the triumph of the cackling cartoon narcissist, America torn in half, its defining myth of city-on-a-hill exceptionalism lying trampled in the gutters of bigotry and racial and male supremacism, Americans' masks ripped off to reveal the Joker faces beneath.

If tales are important, they must be well-shaped.

India, the new myth – a collective fiction in which anything was possible, a fable rivalled only by the two other mighty fantasies: money and God.

because I am the king of this world. That's right, Costello.' He stood once again, 'I was once the master and lord supreme of this dominion. These people are my people. The lonely virgins living in their moms' basement who never read a conspiracy theory they didn't believe, and who never saw a corpse within 25 miles of the Beltway that died of natural causes - they are,' and here McNamara raised his arms aloft, in the manner of a TV Evangelist, to mimic a Southern preachers accent, 'my people.

Whatever their imagined source, the doctrines of modern religions are no more tenable than those which, for lack of adherents, were cast upon the scrap heap of mythology millennia ago; for there is no more evidence to justify a belief in the literal existence of Yahweh and Satan than there was to keep Zeus perched upon his mountain throne or Poseidon churning the seas.

As long as it is acceptable for a person to believe that he knows how God wants everyone on earth to live, we will continue to murder one another on account of our myths.

I also heard from readers whose parents had told the truth about Santa simply because they didn't want the inevitable unraveling of the Christmas myth to cast any doubt on the divinity of Jesus. I suppose some ironies are harder to detect than others.

That is the Mongolian creation myth: out of two different natures love is born. In contradiction, love grows in strength. In confrontation and transformation, love is preserved.

Elvis Presley... had nothing to do with excellence, just myth.

We make the oldest stories new when we succeed, and we are trapped by the old stories when we fail

I think there's a myth that people feel, that people of success are never fearful, that we're never challenged, that we have some supernova - no, we're like everybody else.

They believed babies who died in their cradles had the life sucked out of them by Satan's emissaries or by cats, which were thought to be untrustworthy, evil creatures.