Quotes About Myth

myself ... is merely an instrument to connect life and a myth

Myth embodies the nearest approach to absolute truth that can be stated in words.

Inside the myth of Australia's economic superheroes. We're living through the second longest boom in Australian history. You can't move for talk of the budget surplus.

THE RED FAIRY BOOK

You remember Vietnam veterans being spat upon, incidents that were called an "urban myth" by liberals, until Chicago Tribune columnist Bob Greene asked in his newspaper column if any Vietnam veterans were personally spat upon when they returned to the United States. He received more than a thousand replies, sixty of which are included in his book Homecoming.51

Idea and image juxtapositioned, spinning between myth and rationality, the odd years spent at a right angle; if I over-reach, can I be sure of reclaiming a formula outside habitual movement? How easy it would be to finally slide over, allowing the rest to absolve itself. But remember society owes you nothing, therefore, doing yourself in isn't the answer, no reward for the resentment, and how would I know if it had proved freedom?

Babies do not want to hear about babies; they like to be told of giants and castles.

From the most distant prehistory, masked dancing and dramatic art have woven the fabric of group life. Declaiming and performing myths was a way of reinforcing a common worldview, bringing it to embodied life, imprinting it in members' subconscious. That is what the anarchists were doing.

This is the real meaning of the myth of Midas. It wasn't just that the king might starve to death through blind greed. It was that everything he touched lost its incomparable properties and turned into cold, hard cash.

Interesting, I thought, how quickly history becomes stories rather than reality; one step already from the truth.

Art -- the fresh feeling, new harmony, the transforming magic which by means of myth brings back the scattered distracted soul from its modern chaos -- art, not politics, is the remedy.

Ravelstein mentioned that Keynes had married a Russian ballerina. He also explained to me that Uranus had fathered Aphrodite but that she had had no mother. She was conceived by the sea foam. He would say such things not because he thought I was ignorant of them but because he judged that I needed at a given moment to have my thoughts directed toward them.

I'm sure I've got that part of the Aristophanic sex-myth straight. With the help of Eros we go on, each of us, looking for his missing half. Ravelstein was in real earnest about this quest, driven by longing. Not everyone feels that longing, or acknowledges it if he does feel it. In literature Antony and Cleopatra had it, Romeo and Juliet had it. Closer to our own time Anna Karenina and Emma Bovary had it, Stendhal's Madame de Rênal in her simplicity and innocence had

Clio, the muse of history, is as thoroughly infected with lies as a street whore with syphilis.

Be sure to lie to your kids about the benevolent, all-seeing Santa Claus. It will prepare them for an adulthood of believing in God.

it's not called the Rusty Ruins because some guy called Rusty found them.

Superstition is a part of the very being of humanity; and when we fancy that we are banishing it altogether, it takes refuge in the strangest nooks and corners, and then suddenly comes forth again, as soon as it believes itself at all safe.

Central to all these interlinked themes was that curious irrational, phi, the Golden Section. Schwaller de Lubicz believed that if ancient Egypt possessed knowledge of ultimate causes, that knowledge would be written into their temples not in explicit texts but in harmony, proportion, myth and symbol.

Beliefs are not some special category of idea sitting at a higher station of truth than our ordinary, everyday mortal thoughts. Beliefs are not neccesarily "the truth" at all. (Remember, there was a time everyone believed the earth was flat)

I heard that Jesus had a pet dinosaur. Evolution must be a myth then.

How do you do that?" I asked. "What do witches eat?" "Witches loves pork meat," she said. "They loves rice and potatoes. They loves black-eyed peas and cornbread. Lima beans, too, and collard greens and cabbage, all cooked in pork fat. Witches is old folks, most of them. They don't care none for low-cal. You pile that food on a paper plate, stick a plastic fork in it, and set it down by the side of a tree. And that feeds the witches." The

Do you know the legend about cicadas? They say they are the souls of poets who cannot keep quiet because, when they were alive, they never wrote the poems they wanted to.

The science of morality requires us to, in the end, get beyond the myth of a perfectly objective scientific morality.

Rocket science has been mythologized all out of proportion to its true difficulty.