Quotes About Myths

Consider the example of saturated fat. This nutrient is widely considered to be bad, but the human body uses saturated fats in all kinds of helpful ways. Saturated fat is good. It just so happens that the modern diet contains too much of it. In most cases, what we really mean when we label a certain nutrient bad is that we tend to consume it in excess.

I feel that my advances in the business world will shatter a lot of white myths about black athletes-and give some pride and hope to a lot of young blacks.

One of the most stubborn myths of American history is the idea that the frontier promoted equality of material condition.

For the myths of the East, the myths of the West, the myths of men, and the myths of women—these have so saturated our consciousness that truthful contact between nations and lovers can only be the result of heroic effort.

All myths originate with truth, sometimes it is to raise the influence of a religion by pacifying fears. Sometimes the reality is far more frightening.

In our age, self-indulgence and self-destruction, rather than self-sacrifice, are the foundations for new heroic myths.

In a sense, every human construction, whether mental or material, is a component in a landscape of fear because it exists in constant chaos. Thus children's fairy tales as well as adult's legends, cosmological myths, and indeed philosophical systems are shelters built by the mind in which human beings can rest, at least temporarily, from the siege of inchoate experience and of doubt.

No fiction, no myths, no lies, no tangled webs - this is how Irie imagined her homeland. Because homeland is one of the magical fantasy words like unicorn and soul and infinity that have now passed into language.

It was an innocent question, made reasonable by the body of confused and often contradictory rumors that make Zora Neale Hurston's own legend as richly curious and as dense as are the black myths she did so much to preserve in her classic anthropological works, Mules and Men and Tell My Horse, and in her fiction.

The myths she describes so accurately are in fact "alternative modes for perceiving reality," and never just condescending depictions of the quaint.

As author, she functions as "a midwife participating in the birth of a body of folklore,…the first wondering contacts with natural law." The myths she describes so accurately are in fact "alternative modes for perceiving reality," and never just condescending depictions of the quaint.

If the equality of individuals and the dignity of man be myths, they are myths to which the republic is committed.

I wanted to show that the fables and mythic tales which the ancients have handed down to us and in which painters and sculptors never cease to find mindless pleasure are the hieroglyphics of a secret, inexhaustible wisdom. I sometimes thought I felt its breath, as though coming from behind a veil.

Myths and legends die hard in America. We love them for the extra dimension they provide, the illusion of near-infinite possibility to erase the narrow confines of most men's reality. Weird heroes and mould-breaking champions exist as living proof to those who need it that the tyranny of the rat race is not yet final.

Fables should be taught as fables, myths as myths, and miracles as poetic fantasies. To teach superstitions as truths is a most terrible thing. The child mind accepts and believes them, and only through great pain and perhaps tragedy can he be in after years relieved of them.

The main thing wrong with religion is that people have gotten it wrong. The goal is to understand religion as it should be understood, as traditions, myths, symbols, and practices intended to lead one to a deeper, more profound experience of human life. The desire for this knowledge is hard wired in us. That won't disappear. Unless of course we wipe each other out in the next holy war, in which case we've successfully screwed ourselves.

The thing about playing gods, whether you're playing Thor and Loki or Greco Roman gods or Indian gods or characters in any mythology, the reason that gods were invented was because they were basically larger versions of ourselves.

When the Bible and the Gospels say that the victims should have been spared, they do not merely 'take pity' on them. They puncture the illusion of the unanimous victimization that foundational myths use as a crisis-solving and reordering device of human communities.

Instead of blaming victimization on the victims, the Gospels blame it on the victimizers. What the myths systematically hide, the Bible reveals.

As popular culture becomes more presentist, we move away from entertainment as the vicarious experience of a narrative - as watching someone else's story - and much more toward enacting one's own story. Moving away from myths and toward fantasy role-playing games, away from movies and toward videogames.

Let the credulous and the vulgar continue to believe that all mental woes can be cured by a daily application of old Greek myths to their private parts.

A good many things go around in the dark besides Santa Claus.

No disagreement either from those of us who delight in American deep-dish pies and French tartes and prize the difference, who long for "authentic" foods, however vague we may be on what we mean by "authenticity." In the perceptive words of a great French chef, we eat more myths than calories. We eat, in sum, with our imagination.

our age, self-indulgence and self-destruction, rather than self-sacrifice, are the foundations for new heroic myths.