Quotes About Myth

Remember no one expects you to be Halt. He's a legend, after all. Haven't you heard? He's eight feet tall and kills bears with his bare hands...

This is the power of myth: that we can experience invisible spiritual realities and truths greater than visible, material things in story form.

The moon is made of a green cheese.

Freemasons, anti-Masons, and interested historians will apparently have to live with the simple fact that constant repetition does not create truth.

Parte del problema de crecer y hacerse mayor es que los mitos de la infancia desaparecen.

Myth, the smoke of history, is seen to signal new and more relevant meanings when espied from the distance of later millennia.

It's not the fault of ghosts that we are so frightened of them.

I believe in everything until it's disproved. So I believe in fairies, the myths, dragons. It all exists, even if it's in your mind. Who's to say that dreams and nightmares aren't as real as the here and now?

The death of Baldr is one of the most important moments in the mythology.

When most of us use the word "myth" in conversation, we refer to something that is not true. When historians of religion use it, they generally refer to a representation of the sacred in words. When anthropologists use it, they often refer to narratives that tell about the formation of some social institution or behavior. None of the definitions, however, will hold directly for the characters and stories this book treats.

Müller's theory of myth was actually based on the notion of a "disease of language," the idea that language itself was inadequate to express everything it had to and therefore was a major contributor to the development of gods and myths, which grew out of linguistic confusion.

The indiscriminate aligning of narrative elements to natural phenomena led to the eventual discrediting of comparative mythology, not least when Andrew Lang, a critic of Max Müller, demonstrated that Müller himself was a solar myth.

Under Chairman Mao, every Chinese family was obliged to kill a sparrow a week to stop them eating all the rice. The project was ineffective because sparrows don't eat rice.

The phrase "cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey" is often said to refer to a metallic grid with circular holes in it, set under a pyramid of cannonballs on a ship's deck to keep it stable. When this "brass monkey" got cold enough, the metal contracted and the cannonballs all popped out. In fact, the phrase means exactly what it says; the fake nautical euphemism is an attempt to make its rude humor more acceptable.

Part of the American myth is that people who are handed the skin of a dead sheep at graduating time think that it will keep their minds alive forever.

Man is frail. Man is prone to fallacies, errors, vice, and greed, but good iron never fails. Combine hard iron with a good man and you have the makings of a legend or a myth.

When did blues emerge? We have all heard variations on a mythic answer: The blues been here since time began Since the first lyin' woman met the first cheatin' man.

I wondered if I would remember this feeling after Catherine. The feeling of seeing a friend—someone I knew and who knew me, too, someone who cared about me—walking in through a door or waving from across a hall or bending to whisper in another friend's ear. Of being inside, so inside, such an intimacy, and at the same time seeing it from outside. A feeling of being seen, beautiful and young, seated at a mythic table.

What an intoxicating idea: an alien-a real alien. A creature of mythic resonance.

Faerie had no cold like England; rather it had the dream of cold, and the memory of frost.

My people have a saying that every civilization is founded in a terrible crime.

Farweather was the one who made an extreme sport of plunging through space under her own impulse, sliding about shipless in the void-and practice counts. I wished I believed in the convenient entertainment myth that just really wanting it more than the other guy was enough to insure success.

There was a girl. There's always a girl, they say, and in this case it was true.

The antebellum embrace of Manifest Destiny committed many Americans to an ideal: a country without a past.