Myth Quotes by Louise Wilson, Andre Alexis, George Saunders, Mitch Lasky, Grete Waitz, Jean M. Auel and many others.
A myth is something that never was but that is always happening.
The great myth that many social scientists want to encourage is that there is an incompatibility between modern technology and traditional religion. This is absolute nonsense. If anything, it’s the reverse.
You become a character in a meta-drama into which your own dramatizing has pitched you. The rewards can be fantastic, the punishments dismal; it’s a zero sum game, and its guarantor of value, its marker is that you pretend you play it solo, preserving the myth that you alone are the wellspring of your creativity.
People say that I’m always late, but that’s a myth.
The American myth is of free will in its simple, primary sense. One can choose oneself and will oneself; and this absurdly optimistic assumption so dominates the republic that it has bred all its gross social injustices.
People come up and say, ‘Thank you’ for showing a black family loving their masculine-presenting child and for undoing the myth of black people as being rabidly homophobic.
If this country [America] is to survive, the best-fed-nation myth had better be recognized for what it is: propaganda designed to produce wealth not health.
On The Practice, I get to do what I love to do, and I am making a contribution that will, in the end, help raise social consciousness, dispel some of the myths about being large, and change the way that people view and interact with large people
We must refuse to submit to those institutions which are by definition sexist – marriage, the nuclear family, religions built on the myth of feminine evil.
The market fundamentalist ideology that dominates much of the west has attempted to indoctrinate us with a simple myth: that we all rise or fall according to our individual efforts alone; that billionaires amass vast amounts of wealth because they are entrepreneurial, plucky, go-getting geniuses.
What is becoming more interesting than the myths themselves has been the study of how the myths were constructed from sparse or unpromising facts indeed, sometimes from no facts in a kind of mute conspiracy of longing, very rarely under anybody‘s conscious control.
Myth does not want to be interpreted in cosmological terms but in anthropological terms or, better, in existentialist terms.
There are a lot of myths about gay people.
Ideology is the sterner face of myth and we’re a myth-making people.
myself … is merely an instrument to connect life and a myth
There’s an Inuit myth about the origin of the human race. There were two brothers, and the younger brother eventually gets changed into a woman. And that’s how humans reproduced. And I thought, ‘How could I really understand that?’
All myths that are something more than fancies gain rather than lose in value with time, by reason of the accretions of human experience.
There is this myth, that America is a melting pot, but what happens in assimilation is that we end up deliberately choosing the American things – hot dogs and apple pie – and ignoring the Chinese offerings.
Most of the myths that we carry about spirituality are because we have been dominated by this hyper-masculine trance.
No matter what a woman’s appearance may be, it will be used to undermine what she is saying and taken to individualize – as her personal problem – observations she makes about the beauty myth in society.
It’s a particularly modern myth that married people are best friends. The best-friend concept is a uniquely female phenomena.
The evolutionary epic is … the best myth we will ever have.
At the demonstration of sixty feminists against the Miss America Pageant in 1968, when the women filled a trash can with bras, girdles, curlers and spike-heeled shoes, the bra-burning myth was launched by the media and, in spite of its inaccuracy and spiteful intent, put radical feminism on the map.
The old knowledge had been difficult but not distressing. It had been all paradox and myth, and it had made sense. The new knowledge was all fact and reason, and it made no sense.
I like believing. I believe in all of these Irish myths, like leprechauns. Not the pot of gold, not the Lucky Charms leprechauns. But maybe was there something in the traditional sense? I believe that this stuff came from somewhere other than peoples imaginations.
It is the doctrine of the oligarchy that there is nothing that we hold in common, that the commonwealth is a myth, that it is even a sign of softheadedness and weakness. The oligarchical power feeds on the sense that we are all individuals, struggling on our own, and ennobled by the effort.
It doesn’t matter what is true; it only matters what people believe is true… You are what the media define you to be. [Greenpeace] became a myth and a myth-generating machine.
I don’t like the idea of drama schools. They only perpetuate the myth that everyone can do what I do
The true novelist is one who understands the work as a continuous poem, is a myth-maker, and the wonder of the art resides in the endless different ways of telling a story.
One of the myths propagated by the enemies of Israel is that there is an all-powerful Zionist conspiracy. That is a false accusation. Nevertheless, that AIPAC has been so successful in suppressing criticism has lent some credence to such false beliefs.
The important thing is to make a different world, to make a world that is not now. A real world, a genuine world, but one that allows myth to live. The myth is everything.
The greatest myth of all is what America is. I think that America is such an incredibly dynamic place because of immigration.
Create your own myths; that is how the gods got started.
I always have difficulty with the Greek tragic plays. I think the difficulty one has – which is a serious problem – is the question of belief. Do you believe in the myth that the play expresses? Do you believe in it as myth or as reality? With any play, you have to believe in it as reality. You can’t act a myth.
Anthropologists have promulgated the myth of the peaceful savage so effectively that when actual deaths by war are tabulated for prestate simple societies, one is astonished by how such a notion can continue to be taught to students.
Myths which are believed in tend to become true.
The myth-making machine is the mimetic contagion that disappears behind the myth it generates.
The reality is that you are the spirit. The rest is a myth.
So long has the myth of feminine inferiority prevailed that women themselves find it hard to believe that their own sex was once and for a very long time the superior and dominant sex.
We are not perfect. What god is Examine yours. According to your mythos he was so disappointed with his initial efforts creating your race that he tried again. At least we imprisoned our mistakes. Your god permits his to roam free. At a mere few thousand years old your creation myths are far more absurd than ours.
Culture and technology exist in a dynamic reciprocal relationship. Culture comprehends technology through the means of narratives or myths, and those narratives influence the future shape and purposes of technology. The culture-technology circuit is at the heart of cultural evolution.
People pushing the idea that everyone can live to be 100 are perpetuating a myth that goes all the way back to the Bible.
We tell myths over and over again, lest we forget who we are, lest we not understand that these tales take us through the darkness of our lives, and they put us into a place where you understand what it is to be human.
The myth that John Locke was the philosopher behind the American Republic, is easily refuted by examining how Locke’s philosophy steered Thomas Jefferson, for example.
Myths are stories that express meaning, morality or motivation. Whether they are true or not is irrelevant.
Freud was one of the greatest influences on me. He made myth into psychiatry, and I’ve been trying to turn it back into myth again.
The myth of this world is that the way to transformation is through power, but God choose to enter the world in a weak manner, gentle and tender through the heartbeat of a child.
I am thrilled when I read about fans using my stories as springboards to read about either the historical characters or the myths and legends in the books.
There is the myth that writing books for children is easier than writing books for grownups, whereas we know that truly great books for children are works of genius, whether it’s ‘Alice in Wonderland‘ or the ‘Gruffalo’ or ‘Northern Lights.’ When it’s a great book, it’s a great book, whether it’s for children or not.
[M]yths are not invented as stories are. Myths are inspired-they really are. They come from the same realm that dream comes from.
There’s a myth out there that you have to genuflect at the altar of quarterly earnings. But it’s a false choice that you can either be a good fiduciary or promote values such as environmental sustainability.
We know from myths and fairy tales that there are many different kinds of powers in this world. One child is given a light saber, another a wizard’s education. The trick is not to amass all the different kinds of power, but to use well the kind you’ve been granted.
In the 20th century, the French managed to get a death on the myth that they produce the world’s best food. The hype has been carefully orchestrated, and despite the fact that the most popular food in the last quarter has undoubtedly been Italian, the French have managed to maintain that mental grip.
While the government underwrote the West more than any other region, the myth claimed that hardworking Western cowboys and settlers wanted nothing from the government but to be left alone to work out their own destiny.
To live past the end of your myth is a perilous thing.
Commentating, illustrating, description giving, adjective expert, analyzing, surmising musical myth seeking people of the universe, this is yours.
I think of a myth as a story that helps you explain all the different pieces of your life. In that broad sense, there is no way to live without mythology.
He who has no sympathy with myths has no sympathy with men.
Futurism is another American myth: whether Kennedy, Johnson, Reagan or Obama, American presidents all come into office with a new program, and the conviction that the country is going to be better than ever.
I worked with Stanley Kubrick for almost a year back in 1990, trying to develop the screen story for his project ‘Artificial Intelligence,’ which is about a robot boy who wishes to become a real boy, a future scientific fairy tale inspired in the myth of Pinocchio.
No myth dies harder, and none is more regularly debunked by the facts, than the one about international sports contributing to international friendship.
The women of today are in a fair way to dethrone the myth of femininity; they are beginning to affirm their independence in concrete ways; but they do not easily succeed in living completely the life of a human being.
I dislike Allegory – the conscious and intentional allegory – yet any attempt to explain the purport of myth or fairytale must use allegorical language.
Myths are the prototype for all stories. When we write a story on our own it can’t help but link up with all sorts of myths. Myths are like a reservoir containing every story there is.
The sentiment of those suggesting the Olympics and Paralympics be combined is no doubt well intentioned. But it also echoes the myth that disabled people want to be other than what we are – that we’d like nothing more than to be ‘allowed in’ with the able-bodied competitors.
All minorities think they’re immune, but we’re absolutely part of the one in five that gets skin cancer! It’s a myth, and myths are meant to be debunked!
The idea which…shuts out the Second Coming from our minds, the idea of the world slowly ripening to perfection, is a myth, not a generalization from experience.
But integration and equality are myths; they disguise a new segregation and a new equality…Every social order institutes its own program of separation or segregation. A particular faith and morality is given privileged status and all else is separated for progressive elimination.
The most dangerous leadership myth is that leaders are born – that there is a genetic factor to leadership. This myth asserts that people simply either have certain charismatic qualities or not. That’s nonsense; in fact, the opposite is true. Leaders are made rather than born.
Today a new faith is awakening — the Myth of the blood; the belief that to defend the blood is also to defend the divine nature of man in general. It is a belief, effulgent with the brightest knowledge, that Nordic blood represents that Mysterium which has overcome and replaced the older sacraments.
The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie, deliberate, contrived and dishonest, but the myth, persistent, persuasive and unrealistic.
I’ve long said that comic books are the modern equivalent of our Greek myths.
The poem is not a thing we see; it is, rather, a light by which we may see.
To be a hero means being the author of your own myth.
There can be no stronger proof of the impoverishment of our contemporary culture than the popular – though profoundly mistaken – definition of myth as falsehood.
To me, ‘Unforgiven’ is one of the best films ever made. Aside from the fact it takes the genre and kicks it between its legs, it’s this fascinating deconstruction of the myth of the West.
By myth I mean the arrangement of the incidents
There have been a number of us working very, very hard to bring myth and fairy tales into public consciousness, through fantasy literature and other media. I hope we’re succeeding in some small way.
Conscience is better served by a myth.
The content and forms of American communications-the myths and the means of transmitting them-are devoted to manipulation. When successfully employed, as they invariably are, the result is individual passivity, a state of inertia that precludes action.
Thanks to the discoveries of astronomers in the twentieth century, we now know that the heat death is a myth. The heat death can never happen, and there is no paradox.
The Myth of Male Power dealt much more with the political issues, the legal issues, sexual harassment, date rape, women who kill, and those issues were very much more interfaced with the agendas of feminism.
I think one of the myths is that people don’t change. A lot of people believe that. Their spouse has been an alcoholic for the first 10 years of the marriage, and they say they are never going to change.
What we’re doing with Band of Brothers is trying to put it into human terms, so it is not just a flickering, black and white myth on a screen, it is a resonant story. I want the audience to recognize themselves in these men. They’re not just mythic heroes.
Corporations care very much about maintaining the myth that government is necessarily ineffective, except when it is spending money on the military-industrial complex, building prisons, or providing infrastructural support for the business sector.
It’s a myth that you’ll know the box office result of any film. I don’t think anybody can predict a film’s fate accurately, otherwise nobody would make unsuccessful or flop films.
Pressed for rules and verities, All i recolelct are these: Feed a cold and starve a fever. Argue with no true believer. Think-too-long is never-act. Scratch a myth and find a fact.
Historical sense and poetic sense should not, in the end, be contradictory, for if poetry is the little myth we make, history is the big myth we live, and in our living, constantly remake.
The myths underlying our culture and underlying our common sense have not taught us to feel identical with the universe, but only parts of it, only in it, only confronting it – aliens.
The more real things get, the more like myths they become.
Dream is personalized myth, myth is depersonalized dream; both myth and dream are symbolic in the same general way of the dynamics of the psyche. But in the dream the forms are quirked by the peculiar troubles of the dreamer, whereas in myth the problem and solutions shown are directly valid for all mankind.
The sea always offers up incredible stories of survivors‘ fortitude. Myths of a lot of countries have variations on that.
A third myth is that men think that women like guys who are dangerous. As a result, guys will often smoke cigarettes, drink too much, and ride a motorcycle without a helmet. The reality? Women don’t like guys who are dangerous. Women want us to think that because women are trying to kill us.
We are moving away from myths and toward fantasy role-playing games, away from movies and toward videogames.
Cold Case Files and similar shows do bang up business, which points to a certain thirst for details in the viewership, but it seems like all the news chat shows continue to force the myth that Americans can’t stand detail and have no interest in an idea that can’t fit on a bumper sticker.
From the first place of liquid darkness, within the second place of air and light, I set down the following record with its mixture of fact and truths and memories of truths and its direction toward the Third Place, where the starting point is myth.
For what are myths if not the imposing of order on phenomena that do not possess order in themselves? And all myths, however they differ from philosophical systems and scientific theories, share this with them, that they negate the principle of randomness in the world.
Vulnerability is not weakness. And that myth is profoundly dangerous.
I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge.
The myth does not point to a fact; the myth points beyond facts to something that informs the fact
Mythology is the mother of religions, and grandmother of history.
In Greek myth, a chimera is a creepy combination of lion, goat, dragon – in humans, chimeras are one person who contains two sets of DNA. That’s right. One person comes up in tests as two different people.
Art is the Western myth, with which we both console ourselves and make ourselves.
There is a sad myth going around today – the myth of neutrality. According to this myth, the secular world gives every point of view an equal chance to be heard. And it works fairly well – unless you are a Christian.
To try to write a grand cosmical drama leads necessarily to myth. To try to let knowledge substitute ignorance in increasingly larger regions of space and time is science.
Postmodernists believe that truth is myth, and myth, truth. This equation has its roots in pop psychology. The same people also believe that emotions are a form of reality. There used to be another name for this state of mind. It used to be called psychosis.
The myth of the Kennedys – and the hold – was always the hold of the renegade rich, out there on the frontier beyond accountability.
Myths are made for the imagination to breath life into them.
Artistic symbols and myths speak out of the primordial, preconscious realm of the mind which is powerful and chaotic. Both symbol and myth are ways of bringing order and form into this chaos.
The first myth to dispel is that Africa is not a country. It’s made up of 53 different countries. So to say ‘invest in Africa’ is a no-go. It’s meaningless.
I wanted to connect a modern story with a myth that I had read.
Every country that has experimented with women in actual combat has abandoned the idea, and the notion that Israel uses women in combat is a feminist myth.
Myths, legends and stories are the signposts previous generations have left us so we don’t have to figure out our own personal journey in solitude!
They have to be metaphorical, because their interpretation will be different for each individual life!
They have to be metaphorical, because their interpretation will be different for each individual life!
I don’t like the word ‘superstar‘. It has ridiculous implications. These words – star, stupor, superstar, stupid star – they’re misleading. It’s a myth.
If we want liberation, we must rewrite the Sleeping Beauty myth. No one is coming and no one else is to blame.
The myth of Naipaul… has long been a farce.
I think in a lot of ways unconditional love is a myth. My mom’s the only reason I know it’s a real thing.
No way, no how did I break into NORAD. That’s a complete myth. And I never attempted to access anything considered to be classified government systems.
Every time I open Facebook, I see a post with something like, “We must forgive or be prisoners of our own bitterness and hate.” People think that forgiveness is all-or-nothing, but this myth hurts people. You can forgive 10, 97, or 14 percent. Forgiveness is complicated.
There’s an ideology that’s taken hold of universities, that has taken hold of elite establishments, that is committed to the myth of endemic white racism.
We have had a long held myth of American exceptionalism.
I believe that patterns tend to repeat themselves and there are connections between the past and the present. There is the old proverb that reads, ‘You can’t know where you’re going if you don’t know where you’ve been’. For me, history is like that. When you take history and combine it with myth, then you get mystery.
I saw myself as a trailblazer in the 1980s as a female lawyer in the City. It was exciting, as women were outnumbered by men five to one. But while I had this sense of trailblazing, in reality, I wasn’t pushing boundaries; it was just a personal myth I’d created, as I was doing a job I wasn’t enjoying.
Urban nature is like living with mass conditions. It sometimes feels like a myth & you are its scribe.
I think it’s a bit of a myth that black Americans need one leader. We’re not a monolith. And now that legal segregation and discrimination has been pretty much abolished there isn’t the sort of universal mandate that a black leader would have. Black folks live in a wide variety of social situations right now.
Myths are fun, as long as you don’t confuse them with the truth.
Oral myths are closer to the genetic conclusions than the often ambiguous scientific evidence of archaeology.
There is a place where the human enters dream and myth, and becomes a part of it, or maybe it is the other way around when the story grows from the body and spirit of humankind. In any case, we are a story, each of us, a bundle of stories, some as false as phantom islands but believed in nevertheless. Some might be true.
The whole dear notion of one’s own Self-marvelous old free-willed, free- enterprising, autonomous, independent, isolated island of a Self- is a myth.
There are truths, that are beyond us, transcendent truths, about beauty, truth, honor, etc. There are truths that man knows exist, but they cannot be seen – they are immaterial, but no less real, to us. It is only through the language of myth that we can speak of these truths.
Choose to believe in your own myth your own glamour your own spell a young woman who does this (even if she is just pretending) has everything.
My facts shall be falsehoods to the common sense. I would so state facts that they shall be significant, shall be myths or mythologic. Facts which the mind perceived, thoughts which the body thought – with these I deal.
Today a new faith is stirring: the myth of blood, the faith that along with blood we are defending the divine nature of man as a whole.
If the equality of individuals and the dignity of man be myths, they are myths to which the republic is committed.
I think that we’re just too invested in that myth that we are not connected, and are all potential millionaires if only we put in the work. I think that’s destructive and ignores history and is one of the reasons we as a state are consistently at the bottom of all the lists because we handicap ourselves.
Prostitution myths justify the existence of prostitution, promote misinformation about prostitution, and contribute to a social climate that exploits and harms not only prostituted women but all women.
I think everyone can relate to the werewolf myth – because we’ve all, as a result of alcohol, drugs, exhaustion, rage, gone off the leash and come to regret it later. I appeal to this psychologically – the unleashed id – but with a biological cause; I’m hopefully making possible supernatural circumstances.
A myth… is a metaphor for a mystery beyond human comprehension. It is a comparison that helps us understand, by analogy, some aspect of our mysterious selves. A myth, in this way of thinking, is not an untruth but a way of reaching a profound truth.
You can live in the world of myth and be taken seriously.
I’ve actually written a children’s film called ‘The Myth,’ which you could say is like a big ‘Harry Potter‘-esque fantasy for kids, and that’s a film I would love to see get made. That’s a dream project of mine.
American public policy is run on a myth.
The rising productivity of labor is a myth, a statistical illusion created by measuring combined output in terms of labor input.
Nothing is as contagious as enthusiasm. It is the real allegory of the myth of Orpheus; it moves stones, and charms brutes. It is the genius of sincerity, and truth accomplishes no victories without it.
People say that I’m always late, but that’s a myth
The utopia of the Populists was in the past, not in the future. According to the agrarian myth, the health of the state was proportionate to the degree to which it was dominated by the agricultural class, and this assumption pointed to the superiority of an earlier age.
Things we are accustomed to regard as myth or fairy story are very much present in people’s lives. Nice people behave like wicked stepmothers. Every day.
The myth of fame and the myth of success is cultivated because it is monetisable and it is profitable.
Modern capitalism is based on a myth: that thriving private entrepreneurs generate wealth through their own hard work, innovation and get-up-and-go.
One of the biggest misconceptions about homeschooling, and the ones my friends seemed most concerned about, is that children won’t socialise and will have a limited ability to communicate when they get older. I can honestly say this is a myth.
Whatever we want to think about American business – work hard, tell the truth, have morality – it’s a myth. There’s a lot of graft.
Myth is an attempt to narrate a whole human experience, of which the purpose is too deep, going too deep in the blood and soul, for mental explanation or description.
Selling out is a myth. Bill Gates isn’t selling out, is he? Richard Branson isn’t selling out. Why can’t black people make money?
It is true that race is a social fiction, a myth perpetuated by a variety of peoples throughout the modern period, especially, to further their own gains at the expense of others.
Math-thinking, I would say, encourages flipping and substituting letters in words (in the novel, one of the boys double-majors in math and myth, for example, and his twin cracks a joke about the father’s handwriting that morphs “cacography” into “dadography”).
India’s nuclear-test blasts have pretty much put to rest the myth of Indians being peace-loving Gandhians.
The myth that everyone once read great literature is just a myth.
I think it’s a bit of a myth that if you can read music you can write music. It doesn’t work like that.
There’s been a myth perpetuated where people think, ‘I need to go into consulting, banking, finance, law, or medicine to make a consistently reasonable amount of money.’ People are now realizing that’s not the case.
The value of myth is that it takes all the things you know and restores to them the rich significance which has been hidden by the veil of familiarity.
The myth of black women profiting at the expense of black men is the oldest rap around.
The rise and fall of civilizations in the long, broad course of history can be seen to have been largely a function of the integrity and cogency of their supporting canons of myth; for not authority but aspiration is the motivator, builder, and transformer of civilization.
It’s only recently that I’ve come to understand that writers are not marginal to our society, that they, in fact, do all our thinking for us, that we are writing myths and our myths are believed, and that old myths are believed until someone writes a new one.
I bought into the myth that you are not complete without romantic love, without a mate. And it can really distract you from your goals. But sometimes you have to take a leap.
I think objectivity is like this strange myth that people think you’re supposed to achieve, but actually, the dirty little secret is that it’s not attainable any more than pure justice is attainable by the courts.
When someone admits one and rejects another which is equally in accordance with the appearances, it is clear that he has quitted all physical explanation and descended into myth.
Scientific beliefs are supported by evidence, and they get results. Myths and faiths are not and do not.
In myths the warrant of grace was the acceptance of sacrifice; it is this acceptance that love, the re-enactment of sacrifice, beseeches if it is not to feel under a curse.
The myth of integration as propounded under the banner of the liberal ideology must be cracked because it makes people believe that something is being achieved when in reality the artificially integrated circles are a soporfic to the blacks while salving the consciences of the few guilt-stricken whites.
I was always interested in myths growing up. So, first I got into some Roman myths, then I was interested in Norse, then Celtic, then I started spreading to all the other mythologies.
The most loathsome materialism is not the kind people usually think of, but the sort that attempts to let dead ideas pass for living realities, diverting into sterile myths the stubborn and lucid attention we give to what we have within us that must forever die.
I wrote a couple of songs that had gypsy references in them. The only reason it happened was because that’s what was coming through and I liked the idea at that period of time. But that doesn’t mean that it’s a myth or that I’m a gypsy. It’s gotten totally out of context.
I didn’t learn much about writing at Sarah Lawrence, but I learned a lot about the sources of poems – dreams, myth, history – from the really great teachers, Joseph Campbell, Charles Trinkhaus, Bert Loewenberg, and a young Australian anthropologist named Harry Hawthorne.
Vulnerability is not weakness. And that myth is profoundly dangerous… I define vulnerability as emotional risk, exposure, uncertainty. It fuels our daily lives.
Our thesis is that symbols and myths are an expression of man’s unique self-consciousness, his capacity to transcend the immediate concrete situation and see his life in terms of ‘the possible,’ and that this capacity is one aspect of his experiencing himself as a being having a world.
I hear so many things about who I am supposed to be I hardly know what to believe. I am willing to tell all, but what Is it? Doubtless all these myths and legends will be straightened out eventually, but It may take years.
It takes a very strong brain to resist the absolutes, the myths that the media and the politicians peddle – the idea that if you are too kind, where does it all end? That not to help someone is somehow a good idea.
The poetic myths are dead; and the poetic image, which is the myth of the individual, reigns in their stead.
The beauty myth moves for men as a mirage; its power lies in its ever-receding nature. When the gap is closed, the lover embraces only his own disillusion.
Children are much more understanding of the suddenness and arbitrariness of death than we are. The old fairy tales contain a lot of that, and we’ve stolen from them, just as they stole from Greek myth, which has that same mixture of pre-Christian chaos.
The depth of your mythology is the extent of your effectiveness.
We have deluded ourselves into believing the myth that capitalism grew and prospered out of the Protestant ethic of hard work and sacrifices. Capitalism was built on the exploitation of black slaves and continues to thrive on the exploitation of the poor, both black and white, both here and abroad.
There is at least one truth to every myth, and it takes one truth to create a lie. Lies can be formed from Truth; however, Truth cannot be formed from lies.
The “October Revolution” is a myth generated by the winners, the Bolsheviks, and swallowed whole by progressive circles in the West.
I liked myths. They weren’t adult stories and they weren’t children’s stories. They were better than that. They just were.
The great myth of our work-intense era is ‘quality time.’ We believe we can make up for the loss of days or hours, especially with each other, by concentrated minutes. But ultimately there is no way to do one-minute mothering. There is no way to pay attention in a hurry.
I just wish this social institution [religion] wasnt based on what appears to me to be a monumental hoax built on an accumulation of customs and myths directed toward proving something that isnt true.
writers are makers, not just transmitters, of myths. Literature offers not only myths but counter-myths, just as life offers counter-experiences – experiences that confound what you thought you thought, or felt, or believed.
It is easy to imagine fantasy as physical and myth as real. We do it almost every moment. We do this as we dream, as we think, and as we cope with the world about us. But these worlds of fantasy that we form into the solid things around us are the source of our discontent. They inspire our search to find ourselves.
I think if I was Trinidadian, I would latch more on to the myths and romanticise the place more. I don’t think it’s my place to do that – they’re not really mine. I’m an outsider.
Myths are lies that tell the truth.
In one African myth the word for God is even identical with skill and capacity. The Godhead is defined as that thing which appears in man as the mystery of an unusual skill or capacity. It is something divine, a spark of the divinity in him, not his own possession or achievement, but a miracle.
Although they like to call themselves journalists, that’s a myth even they don’t really believe anymore. They’re mutts on short leashes.
The poet who speaks out of the deepest instincts of man will be heard. The poet who creates a myth beyond the power of man to realize is gagged at the peril of the group that binds him. He is the true revolutionary: he builds a new world.
There is a social stigma attached to ambulance services, mostly because ambulances in India are often used as hearses for carrying the dead rather than transporting patients. We made presentations to graduating students at various healthcare institutes, trying to debunk this myth.
What’s Your Purple Goldfish? busts a myth and reveals a simple truth about customer service. Stan uncovers the recipe for creating signature added value that increases customer satisfaction and drives positive word of mouth.
Thus science must begin with myths, and with the criticism of myths; neither with the collection of observations, nor with the invention of experiments, but with the critical discussion of myths, and of magical techniques and practices.
The electron can no longer be conceived as a single, small granule of electricity; it must be associated with a wave, and this wave is no myth; its wavelength can be measured and its interferences predicted.
Every articulate family … generates its own stories, explanations and myths to illuminate the differences in temperament and talent among its children, the lines of allegiance and influence between parent and child.
I believe that patterns tend to repeat themselves and there are connections between the past and the present. There is the old proverb that reads, You cant know where youre going if you dont know where youve been. For me, history is like that. When you take history and combine it with myth, then you get mystery.
You call a star a star, and say it is just a ball of matter moving on a mathematical course. But that is merely how you see it. By so naming things and describing them you are only inventing your own terms about them. And just as speech is invention about objects and ideas, so myth is invention about truth.
To explode a myth is accordingly not to deny the facts but to re-allocate them.
You have to think of your brand as a kind of myth. A myth is a compelling story that is archetypal, if you know the teachings of Carl Jung. It has to have emotional content and all the themes of a great story: mystery, magic, adventure, intrigue, conflicts, contradiction, paradox.
There is a segment of the American population that has been excluded from the national myth, and that should be redressed.
Men, believing in myths, will always fear something terrible, everlasting punishment as certain or probable . . . Men base all these fears not on mature opinions, but on irrational fancies, that they are more disturbed by fear of the unknown than by facing facts. Peace of mind lies in being delivered from all these fears.
All myth is an enriched pattern, a two-faced proposition, allowing its operator to say one thing and mean another, to lead a double life. Hence the notion found early in ancient thought that all poets are liars. And from the true lies of poetry trickled out a question. What really connects words and things?
I have a better internal and intuitive understanding of folklore and myth than science and technology, so in that way fantasy is easier.
A lot of politics plays at the level of myth, and if you understand that, then you feel like you have access to the secret language of politics. People respond to political characters in archetypal ways. A fun game is to think of a politician and ask, “Which god is that? Are they like Aries? Are they like Athena?”.
I love how Hollywood still wants to perpetuate the myth that beaches in Southern California are warm at night.
After all, I believe that legends and myths are largely made of ‘truth’.
There is actually a great book called Prima Donna by Rupert -Christiansen that deconstructs the myth. In fact, many of the women who were prima donnas were feminists and incredible forces for their time.
Your quest is for darkness only. This sea is not your sea. The myths of men are not your myths. Men’s treasures are not yours.
Here I stand and make Both myth and reality in my own way And live the violence of my dream and of my reality.
When gossip gets old it becomes a myth.
I want the kids to know that it’s not a myth that somebody from their city plays and wins in the NBA. I just want to influence them to work hard and do whatever they want to do in life, whether it’s to be a basketball player or scientist… if they believe in themselves, they can do anything.
There is a whole myth about super people. That super people can do everything and they do it on their own.
It reflects a prevailing myth that production technology is no more amenable to human judgment or social interests than the laws of thermodynamics, atomic structure or biological inheritance.
Society is held together by our need; we bind it together with legend, myth, coercion, fearing that without it we will be hurled into that void, within which, like the earth before the Word was spoken, the foundations of society are hidden.
The only thing on my mind is getting into that ring and destroying a boxing myth, someone who has reached a level of infamy through doing a number of stupid things.
Today the insatiable quest for profit promotes the new slavery. In bewildering ways, the new is more pernicious than the old, for the New American Slave is told he is free, and he clings to that myth as if his life depended upon it, a suspicion that cannot be totally ignored.
Myths are clues to the spiritual potentialities of the human life.
Follow the lead of your symptoms, for there’s usually a myth in the mess, and a mess is an expression of soul.
Science only answers the question, How does it work? Or at most, What’s there? Science asks what and how, philosophy asks why, myth and religion ask who. Who’s in charge here? Who’s the author? That’s what we really long to know.
Writers have it easy. If you write a bestseller or have your book made into a movie, you’ll never have to work again, or so the myth goes.
Our national myths often exaggerate the role of the individual heroes and understate the importance of collective effort.
I think it’s a myth that American public or any other public is so stupid that they need to be constantly pricked.
Disease is surely one of the ways in which we are tried by life and offered the chance to be heroic. Though few of us will win Olympic gold medals or slay dragons, disease can be the spark or gift that allows many of us to live out our personal myths and become heroes.
History shows us that the songs – the myth, the experience and the emotion – live longer the less you explain.
If we accept that we are all cut from the same genetic cloth, all cultures share the same genius. And whether that genius is placed into technological wizardry which has been our great achievement, or, by contrast, placed into the unraveling of complex threads of memory inherent in a myth is simply a matter of choice.
I think horror or science fiction is another way of telling a modern myth – it’s like Ancient Greece; it’s like kids couldn’t wait for the next ‘Orpheus’ story, the next ‘Jason and the Argonauts.’
We cannot resort to simplistic or extreme solutions which substitute myths for common sense.
All of a sudden people in the United States start to realize that vaccines make a difference. The controversy and the myth that’s there, we’re always trying to bust through that. So when I see a disease outbreak, I say to myself, “OK, that’ll get people realizing how lucky we are to have vaccines.”
The first myth of management is that it exists.
I’m a man of the marketplace as well as an artist. I’m a pawnbroker of myth.
The idea of a superior or inferior race is a myth that has been completely refuted by anthropological evidence.
I resent it when they write the part of a woman who’s just a sexy femme fatale who seduces people to ger her way, perpetrating the myth that that’s how woman have to operate, instead of using their brains or their wit.
Stumbling upon the next great invention in an ‘ah-ha!’ moment is a myth.
Ego and conditionings are created by mind, which is a myth.
Even by proving that a certain view is indispensable for living well, one proves merely that the view in question is a salutary myth: one does not prove it to be true.
Some part of me knew from the first that what I wanted was not reality but myth.
Nothing I had written before ‘Mary Poppins’ had anything to do with children, and I have always assumed, when I thought about it at all, that she had come out of the same wall of nothingness as the poetry, myth and legend that had absorbed me all my writing life.
Being a harsh, dirty comic, the last person on earth I ever expected to help my career was Jay Leno. I had always thought of performing on ‘The Tonight Show’ as an unachievable goal, because I bought into the myth that only squeaky clean, family-friendly material would be welcome there.
Perhaps the greatest myth being purveyed,
is that myths are just myths.
is that myths are just myths.
The great thing about fairy tales and myths is that they go beyond character. They’re not about character. They’re about more basic things. They’re about basic fears or longings or desires or fantasies, and stuff like that.
The megapixel war in conventional cameras has been a total myth. It’s taking us all in the wrong direction. Once a picture goes online, you’re throwing away 95 to 98 percent of those pixels.
The greatest reward of this constant interrogation, confrontation with the brutality of my country, is that it has freed me from hosts and myths.
The only thing they [government] want is better data. But data doesn’t tell people someone is well educated. It’s a vicious circle. There is some myth involved. Some of this attitude has a long history.
I say that a myth is a story which has particular energy, mythic resonance. I always say that a myth is a tear in the fabric of reality through which all of this spiritual energy pours.
Congress acknowledged that society’s accumulated myths and fears about disability and disease are as handicapping as are the physical limitations that flow from actual impairment.
When you talk about Puyol, you speak of a myth of football.
The images of Myth are reflections of Spiritual and Depth potentialities of every one of us. Through contemplating those we evoke those powers in our own lives to operate through ourselves.
Successful model? That’s a myth. The year I modeled was the most painful year of my life. Editors would always talk to you in the third person as though you were merely a piece of merchandise.
But, look, Washington is a town that creates myths for its own existence and its own amusement, and I was a subject of myth, sort of like Grendel in Beowulf – you know, not seen very often but often talked about.
Accountants, machinists, medical technicians, even software writers that write the software for ‘machines’ are being displaced without upscaled replacement jobs. Retrain, rehire into higher paying and value-added jobs? That may be the political myth of the modern era. There aren’t enough of those jobs.
Those who claim absolutism is merely a myth are right that it has been misused simply as a byword for political centralisation.
We need to stop buying into the myth about gender equality. It isn’t a reality yet. Today, women make up half of the U.S. workforce, but the average working woman earns only 77 percent of what the average working man makes. But unless women and men both say this is unacceptable, things will not change.
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.
Legends have always played a powerful role in the making of history. … Without ever relating facts reliably, yet always expressing their true significance, they offered a truth beyond realities, a remembrance beyond memories.
Great historians can make the discovery of the real story more exciting than the romantic myth. Stacy Schiff, a great historian as well as a wonderful writer, peels away the layers to reveal the true Cleopatraa much more interesting woman than the Hollywood version and, as it turns out, a formidable queen after all.
This country has such little sense of itself sometimes, I’m astonished. America is one of the biggest myth-making countries, whether we’re talking about how many books are published, how many movies we make. But the greatest myth of all is what America is.
Myths often do a lot of theoretical good, while they are still new.
Nothing is more difficult than competing with a myth
The question is always the same with a dragon: will he talk with you or will he eat you?
But if it not be true, the myth itself requires to be explained, and every principle of philosophy and common sense demand that the explanation be sought, not in arbitrary allegorical categories, but in the actual facts of ritual or religious custom to which the myth attaches.
The idea that creative endeavor and mind-altering substances are entwined is one of the great pop-intellectual myths of our time.
There is no sex without a cue. People who date have their cues at home, before they meet. You think about where to go, what to eat, what to do and say. Sometimes the cue is short – – just before we reach the bar – – but sex is never just spontaneous. Spontaneity is a myth.
For me, there was no great myth around the movies when I was a young child. My father was very simple about the whole thing. He did not consider cinema an art. Cinema was entertainment. Literature and music were art.
There is a myth that writers get to choose their stories. You don’t get to choose your story any more than you get to choose your children. You can make the decision to write, but beyond that, at the end of the day, it’s going to come out how it’s going to come out.
