Quotes About Myths

Rumors are always out there.

What difference is there, after all, between the narrative we find in fiction and that which we find in the myths and legends that make up scriptures and Tantras? If a story works - if it conveys a truth, elicits an emotional response, tells us something we did not know before and allows us to own that something - then it has much the same function as a scriptural text. The first dramas were religious in nature; the first theatrical performances were rituals.

Fundamentalists who demand that their creation myths be inserted into science classes tend to look at you funny when you suggest that likewise, we could insert passages from On the Origin of Species into the book of Genesis.

The war was still being fought, but this desire to go back did not spring from any patriotic ideas about duty, honor, and sacrifice, the myths with which old men send young men off to get killed or maimed.

History... is an aggregation of truths, half-truths, semi-truths, fables, myths, rumors, prejudices, personal narratives, gossip, and official prevarications. It is a canvas upon which thousands of artists throughout the ages have splashed their conceptions and interpretations of a day and an era. Some motifs are grotesque and some are magnificent.

There is a king of natural selection that takes place among myths. Those that capture something essential to the human condition can be preserved for thousands of years. Those that are relevant only to a few are lost forever.

Oh, yes, let's bless the imagination. It gives us the myths we live by. Let's bless the visionary power of the human— the only animal that's got it—, bless the exact image of your father dead and mine dead, bless the images that stalk the corners of our sight and will not let go.

My first memory of the public library is of lugging home a volume of Norse myths as heavy as a thunder-god's hammer.

One of the enduring myths of campaign analysis is that you can actually count the number of 'undecided' voters by asking voters if they are undecided or not. Sometimes, significant numbers of voters actually change their minds.

the vast majority of rapes, well over eighty percent, are actually non-stranger rapes." One of the other myths, he added, was the widely held belief that "a non-stranger assault is less serious and has less serious harm

Mandelstam was, one is tempted to say, a modern Orpheus: sent to hell, he never returned, while his widow dodged across one-sixth of the earth's surface, clutching the saucepan with his songs rolled up inside, memorizing them by night in the event they were found by Furies with a search warrant. These are our metamorphoses, our myths.

Myths are public dreams, dreams are private myths. We must be willing to get rid of the life we planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us. I have bought this wonderful machine — a computer ... it seems to me to be an Old Testament god, with a lot of rules and no mercy.

the society that cherishes and keeps its myths alive will be nourished from the soundest, richest strata of the human spirit.

Some things die after they born, others born after they die. myths are public dreams, dreams are privet myths...

The myths and folktales of the whole world make clear that the refusal is essentially a refusal to give up what one takes to be one's own interest. The future is regarded not in terms of an unremitting series of deaths and births, but as though one's own present system of ideals, virtues, goals, and advantages were to be fixed and made secure.

But if we are to grasp the full value of the materials, we must note that myths are not exactly comparable to dream. Their figures originate from the same sources -- the unconscious wells of fantasy-- and their grammar is the same, but they are not the spontaneous products of sleep. On the contrary their patterns are consciously controlled. And their understood function is to serve as powerful picture language for the communication of traditional wisdom.

Myths are public dreams; dreams are private myths.

Myths inspire the realization of the possibility of your perfection, the fullness of your strength, and the bringing of solar light into the world. Slaying monsters is slaying the dark things. Myths grab you somewhere down inside.

where do these kids get their myths today? CAMPBELL: They make them up themselves. This is why we have graffiti all over the city. These kids have their own gangs and their own initiations and their own morality, and they're doing the best they can. But they're dangerous because their own laws are not those of the city. They have not been initiated into our society.

The dead are buried to be born again, and the cycles of the plant world become models for the myths and rituals of mankind.

Myths are the mental supports of rites; rites, the physical enactments of myths.

Fairytales are full of impossible tasks.

The history of psychiatry shows that many ideas and concepts that once had attained the status of incontrovertible facts were later discarded as nothing more than myths or superstitions. We are forced to the realization that the study of the nature and treatment of the neuroses--or emotional disorders--does not rest on any proven theorems or generally shared assumptions.

sexual violence and rape in our oldest texts. These include the rape of Hera, Antiope, Europa and Leda, all by Zeus; Persephone by Hades; Odysseus by Calypso;