Quotes About Myths

My first mentor and inspiration was my Irish Dancing teacher Patricia Mulholland. She created her own form of dance known as Irish ballet and created stage productions of old Irish myths and legends. They were my first experiences on stage. She told my mum I was destined for the stage, and I took that as my cue.

Myths are wonderful tools that we've had, oh, for eons now that help us navigate the situations we find ourselves in.

As I detail in my new book: 'Hard Measures, How Aggressive CIA Actions After 9/11 Saved American Lives,' there are many myths surrounding the detention of a relatively small number of top terrorists at CIA-run 'black sites' from 2002 until they were sent to Guantanamo Bay in 2006.

Where are the gods of the east, the strong heroes who carried lightning as a weapon, those who on the shores of sacred rivers took offerings of honey and milk? They are dead. Dead is Bel, the strong warrior, and Thot, the hawk-headed champion. Dead are the magnificents who rested on the cloud beds of Olympus, as are the adventurers who lived in walled Valhalla. All the gods of the ancients are dead except Eros, the all-governing.

That's how myths are born. Out of our carelessness, out of our tattered nerves, out of jokes that go wrong and flashy gestures.

All myths that are something more than fancies gain rather than lose in value with time, by reason of the accretions of human experience.

As the enthusiasm for the Soviet model waned, the idealistic and dissenting energies of intellectuals and the young embraced other cult figures and myths of salvation and purification: Mao, Fidel, Che, and even Pol Pot.

He was an erudite man and began our conversation with a history of slave religion, telling me about the Africans who, newly landed on hostile shoes, had sat circled around a fire mixing newfound myths with ancient rhythms, their songs becoming a vessel for those most radical of ideas – survival, and freedom, and hope.

Here is one reason I think we always need new tarot decks being created. I think of tarot decks as similar to myths and so I think this quote applies: Myths are so intimately bound to culture, time, and place that unless the symbols, the metaphors, are kept alive by constant recreation through the arts, the life just slips away from them. Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth

Nothing is more powerful than a compelling story, especially in the framework of a revolution, which entails a struggle to create new symbols, new vocabularies, new ways of looking at the world, new identities, new myths.

I used to read the myths of love Now I have become the mythical lover

People avoid egg yolks because they're afraid of the cholesterol, but the choline in the egg yolk actually helps prevent the accumulation of cholesterol and fat in the liver!

Myths are the stories we tell ourselves about how we behave, when we don't know how it is we behave or even why.

As I think of the many myths, there is one that is very harmful, and that is the myth of countries. I mean, why should I think of myself as being an Argentine, and not a Chilean, and not an Uruguayan. I don't know really. All of those myths that we impose on ourselves -- and they make for hatred, for war, for enmity -- are very harmful. Well, I suppose in the long run, governments and countries will die out and we'll be just, well, cosmopolitans.

Fascism says what you and I experience as facts or what reporters experience as facts are irrelevant. All that matters are impressions and emotions and myths.

When hero confronts monster in these myths it is apt to be a family quarrel.

I was expressing the fear that America could become just another country, bigger than most, more powerful, grappling with myths that were a little more outsized than the others, but all in all a country like another, with a president who, seventy-five years ago and in the grip of the original America First, might not have waged war against Nazism.

Psychoanalysis teaches that all myths, including those of our beginnings and first home, have their source in the unconscious wish. Often the same myths are called on to relieve deep anxieties by suggesting that once we lived without fear or despair and may do so again. Sometimes the myth contains a kernel of truth, but out of so distant a past that we can hardly discern, behind the elaborate tales spun around them, what may once have been familiar historical events.

Myths are useful in forming not the total personality, but only the superego. The child knows that he cannot possibly live up to the hero's virtue, or parallel his deeds; all he can be expected to do is emulate the hero to some small degree; so the child is not defeated by the discrepancy between his ideal and his own smallness.

Myths project an ideal personality acting on the basis of superego demands, while fairy tales depict an ego integration which allows for appropriate satisfaction of id desires. This difference accounts for the contrast between the pervasive pessimism of myths and the essential optimism of fairy tales.

I agree with people like Richard Dawkins that mankind felt the need for creation myths. Before we really began to understand disease and the weather and things like that, we sought false explanations for them. Now science has filled in some of the realm – not all – that religion used to fill.

Today, we're still loaded down - and, to some extent, embarrassed - by ancient myths, but we respect them as part of the same impulse that has led to the modern, scientific kind of myth. But we now have the opportunity to discover, for the first time, the way the universe is in fact constructed as opposed to how we would wish it to be constructed.

Texas is so wrapped up in myth and legend, it's hard to know what the state and its people are really about. Real Texans, raised on these myths and legends, sometimes become legends themselves.

Part of my problem is that I cannot dispel the myths that have somehow accumulated over the years. Somebody writes something, it's completely off the wall, but it gets filed and repeated until everyone believes it. For instance, I've read that I wear a football helmet in the car.