Myths Quotes

1. "For most of the history of our species we were helpless to understand how nature works. We took every storm, drought, illness and comet personally. We created myths and spirits in an attempt to explain the patterns of nature."
Author: Ann Druyan

2. "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."
Author: Bernie S. Siegel

3. "I truly appreciate the special qualities that America and American national myths offer me."
Author: Bharati Mukherjee

4. "Sara Kendell once read somewhere that the tale of the world is like a tree. The tale, she understood, did not so much mean the niggling occurrences of daily life. Rather it encompassed the grand stories that caused some change in the world and were remembered in ensuing years as, if not histories, at least folktales and myths. By such reasoning, Winston Churchill could take his place in British folklore alongside the legendary Robin Hood; Merlin Ambrosius had as much validity as Martin Luther. The scope of their influence might differ, but they were all a part of the same tale."
Author: Charles De Lint

5. "The myths that are created about the South, about the way we grew up, about black people, are wrong."
Author: Clarence Thomas

6. "YOU YOU YOUyour eyes, thick as a high school scrapbook crackling and yellow, curling at the edgesa book of myths in which i do not appear."
Author: Clint Catalyst

7. "If swans weren't real, myths'd make them up."
Author: David Mitchell

8. "This is the mythosphere. It's made up of all the stories, theories and beliefs, legends, myths and hopes, that are generated here on Earth. As you can see, it's constantly growing and moving as people invent new tales to tell or find new things to believe. The older strands move out to become these spirals, where things tend to become quite crude and dangerous. They've hardened off, you see."
Author: Diana Wynne Jones

9. "Distinctly American poetry is usually written in the context of one's geographic landscape, sometimes out of one's cultural myths, and often with reference to gender and race or ethnic origins."
Author: Diane Wakoski

10. "Apparently, myths become truths if upheld long enough."
Author: Eric Chaisson

11. "Once their rage explodes, they recover their lost coherence, they experience self-knowledge through reconstruction of themselves; from afar we see their war as the triumph of barbarity; but it proceeds on its own to gradually emancipate the fighter and progressively eliminates the colonial darkness inside and out. As soon as it begins it is merciless. Either one must remain terrified or become terrifying—which means surrendering to the dissociations of a fabricated life or conquering the unity of one's native soil. When the peasants lay hands on a gun, the old myths fade, and one by one the taboos are overturned: a fighter's weapon is his humanity. For in the first phase of the revolt killing is a necessity: killing a European is killing two birds with one stone, eliminating in one go oppressor and oppressed: leaving one man dead and the other man free;"
Author: Frantz Fanon

12. "Now we shall have a vessel in which to pour the vital fluid, a bomb which, when we throw it, will set off the world. We shall put into it enough to give the writers of tomorrow their plots, their dramas, their poems, their myths, their sciences. The world will be able to feed on it for a thousand years to come. It is colossal in its pretentiousness. The thought of it almost shatters us."
Author: Henry Miller

13. "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."
Author: Hypatia

14. "You call a tree a tree, he said, and you think nothing more of the word. But it was not a 'tree' until someone gave it that name. 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.We have come from God (continued Tolkien), and inevitably the myths woven by us, though they contain error, will also reflect a splintered fragment of the true light, the eternal truth that is with God. Indeed only by myth-making, only by becoming a 'sub-creator' and inventing stories, can Man aspire to the state of perfection that he knew before the Fall. Out myths may be misguided, but they steer however shakily towards the true harbor, while materialistic 'progress' leads only to a yawning abyss and the Iron Crown of evil."
Author: J.R.R. Tolkien

15. "One of the myths about Dad was that he was mean. That simply wasn't true. I always found him generous to a fault but he wasn't reckless with his money, which was rather rare in Hollywood. He'd grown up with nothing and he wasn't about to fritter it all away."
Author: Jennifer Grant

16. "Information and inspiration are everywhere... history, art, architecture, everything an illustrator needs. Europe is, after all, the land that has generated most of the enduring myths and legends of Western culture."
Author: John Howe

17. "Myths are public dreams, dreams are private myths."
Author: Joseph Campbell

18. "She started telling Lyda stories, odd nameless placeless stories, about the man and the woman, myths or memories, perhaps from her own childhood."
Author: Julianna Baggott

19. "This was the scientific age, and people wanted to believe that their traditions were in line with the new era, but this was impossible if you thought that these myths should be understood literally. Hence the furor occasioned by The Origin of Species, published by Charles Darwin. The book was not intended as an attack on religion, but was a sober exploration of a scientific hypothesis. But because by this time people were reading the cosmogonies of Genesis as though they were factual, many Christians felt--and still feel--that the whole edifice of faith was in jeopardy. Creation stories had never been regarded as historically accurate; their purpose was therapeutic. But once you start reading Genesis as scientifically valid, you have bad science and bad religion."
Author: Karen Armstrong

20. "Science must begin with myths, and with the criticism of myths."
Author: Karl Popper

21. "We have looked for myths that include us in great novels, music, the latest comic book, or even some stupid advertising campaign. We'll look *anywhere* for a mythology that embraces people like ourselves."
Author: Kate Bornstein

22. "At certain epochs, man has felt conscious of something about himself - body and spirit - which was outside the day-to-day struggle for existence and the night-to-night struggle with fear; and he has felt the need to develop these qualities of thought and feeling so that they might approach as nearly as possible to an ideal of perfection - reason, justice, physical beauty, all of them in equilibrium. He has managed to satisfy this need in various ways - through myths, through dance and song, through systems of philosophy and through the order that he has imposed upon the visible world."
Author: Kenneth Clark

23. "True friendships don't fade in Hollywood, as so many myths about show business would have you insist."
Author: Kent McCord

24. "One of the most widespread myths about the deal is that the Administration is outsourcing the security of our ports to a company from the United Arab Emirates."
Author: Kit Bond

25. "Folklore, legends, myths and fairy tales have followed childhood through the ages, for every healthy youngster has a wholesome and instinctive love for stories fantastic, marvelous and manifestly unreal. The winged fairies of Grimm and Andersen have brought more happiness to childish hearts than all other human creations."
Author: L. Frank Baum

26. "People think boundaries and borders build nations. Nonsense-words do. Beliefs, declarations, constitutions-words. Stories. Myths. Lies. Promises. History"
Author: Libba Bray

27. "I should have learned my lesson from Greek myths, really. It so doesn't pay to fall in love with a god. It's either you get transformed – flower, bull, you name it, the gods can be that petty – or you just get…crushed."
Author: Marian Tee

28. "There is a vast mythology surrounding meat, but all the myths are in one way or another related to what I refer to as the Three Ns of Justification: eating meat is normal, natural, and necessary. The Three Ns have been invoked to justify all exploitative systems, from African slavery to the Nazi Holocaust. When an ideology is in its prime, these myths rarely come under scrutiny. However, when the system finally collapses, the Three Ns are recognized as ludicrous."
Author: Melanie Joy

29. "But because we live in an age of science, we have a preoccupation with corroborating our myths."
Author: Michael Shermer

30. "...through reading, the modern man succeeds in obtaining an "escape from time" comparable to the "emegence from time" effected by myths. (...) Reading projects him out if his personal duration and incorporates him into other rythms, makes him live in another "history"."
Author: Mircea Eliade

31. "You claim that the evidentiary miracle is present and available, namely, the Koran. You say: 'Whoever denies it, let him produce a similar one.' Indeed, we shall produce a thousand similar, from the works of rhetoricians, eloquent speakers and valiant poets, which are more appropriately phrased and state the issues more succinctly. They convey the meaning better and their rhymed prose is in better meter. … By God what you say astonishes us! You are talking about a work which recounts ancient myths, and which at the same time is full of contradictions and does not contain any useful information or explanation. Then you say: 'Produce something like it'?"
Author: Muhammad Ibn Zakariya Al Razi

32. "Myths tell us what those like us have done, can do, should do. Without myths to lead the way, we hesitate to leap forward. Listen to the wrong myths, and we might even go back a few steps."
Author: N.K. Jemisin

33. "Myths about the dire effects of genetically modified foods on health and the environment abound, but they have not held up to scientific scrutiny. And, although many concerns have been expressed about the potential for unexpected consequences, the unexpected effects that have been observed so far have been benign."
Author: Nina Fedoroff

34. "Religion, which was obviously created to give meaning and purpose to people, has become part of the oppression. This is true in both Eastern and Western religious traditions. The Buddha, Jesus and Muhammad were all revolutionaries who critiqued and attempted to dismantle the corrupt societal traditions of their time. Yet their teachings, like most things in human society, have been distorted and co-opted by the confused and power-hungry patriarchal tradition. What were wonce the creation myths of ancient cultures, have become doctrines of oppression. More blood has been spilled and more people oppressed in the name of religion than for any other reason in history."
Author: Noah Levine

35. "National historical myths are a way of giving identity and more authenticity to a people. Exodus flattered the Jews half a millennium after it allegedly took place by making them feel like heroic refugees from slavery, and righteous conquerors of a land corrupted by paganism, wealth, and sex. The Illiad made the politicians, merchants, sailors, farmers, and schoolteachers of Athens in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. into the heirs of austere, remorseless, honorable, courageous warriors, a race of demigods. Contrast this with the real Athenians of ca. 375 B.C. -- their bellies full of fishcakes, their throats bloated with cheap resined wine, their far-flung sharp commercial deals a laughable, reverse mirror-image of the noble warriors of the Trojan War era."
Author: Norman F. Cantor

36. "Even revolution, which transforms a concrete situation of oppression by establishing the process of liberation, must confront this phenomenon. Many of the oppressed who directly or indirectly participate in revolution intend - conditioned by the myths of the old order - to make it their private revolution. The shadow of their former oppressor is still cast over them."
Author: Paulo Freire

37. "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."
Author: Peter Doig

38. "How should we be able to forget those ancient myths that are at the beginning of all peoples, the myths about dragons that at the last moment turn into princesses; perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us.So you must not be frightened if a sadness rises up before you larger than any you have ever seen; if a restiveness, like light and cloudshadows, passes over your hands and over all you do. You must think that something is happening with you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand; it will not let you fall. Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any miseries, or any depressions? For after all, you do not know what work these conditions are doing inside you."
Author: Rainer Maria Rilke

39. "So certainly, if we can tell evil stories to make people sick, we can also tell good myths that make them well."
Author: Rainer Werner Fassbinder

40. "My aunt and my mother read to me when I was three from all the old Grimm fairy tales, Andersen fairy tales, and then all the Oz books as I was growing up… So by the time when I was ten or eleven, I was just full to the brim with these, and the Greek myths, and the Roman myths. And then, of course, I went to Sunday school, and then you take in the Christian myths, which are all fascinating in their own way… I guess I always tended to be a visual person, and myths are very visual, and I began to draw, and then I felt the urge to carry on these myths.If I'm anything at all, I'm not really a science-fiction writer — I'm a writer of fairy tales and modern myths about technology."
Author: Ray Bradbury

41. "My eighth grade teacher, Mrs. Pabst, had done her master's thesis on Tolkien. She showed me how the trilogy was patterned after Norse mythology. She was also the first person to encourage me to submit stories for publication. The idea of writing a fantasy based on myths never left me, and many years later, this would lead me to write Percy Jackson."
Author: Rick Riordan

42. "Humans live through their myths and only endure their realities."
Author: Robert Anton Wilson

43. "Camus felt defenseless against these "deep forces rising within me that said ‘no.' " No, in a word, to plans for the future, to talk about tomorrow, to things not yet done. Instead, Camus demands the weight of the present, of the earth, of a world shorn of its myths and faith in anything other than what we can see and touch and feel."
Author: Robert Zaretsky

44. "Our practical faith in progress has ramified and hardened into an ideology -- a secular religion which, like the religions that progress has challenged, is blind to certain flaws in its credentials. Progress, therefore, has become 'myth' in the anthropological sense. By this I do not mean a belief that is flimsy or untrue. Successful myths are powerful and often partly true. […] The myth of progress has sometimes served us well -- those of us seated at the best tables, anyway -- and may continue to do so. […] Progress has an internal logic that can lead beyond reason to catastrophe. (4-5)"
Author: Ronald Wright

45. "This universe is shot through with mystery. The very fact of its being, and of our own, is a mystery absolute, and the only miracle worthy of the name. The consciousness that animates us is itself central to this mystery and the ground for any experience we might wish to call 'spiritual.' No myths need be embraced for us to commune with the profundity of our circumstance. No personal God need be worshiped for us to live in awe at the beauty and immensity of creation. No tribal fictions need be rehearsed for us to realize, one fine day, that we do, in fact, love our neighbors, that our happiness is inextricable from their own, and that our interdependence demands that people everywhere be given the opportunity to flourish."
Author: Sam Harris

46. "Old myths, old gods, old heroes have never died.They are only sleeping at the bottom of your mind,waiting for our call. We have need for them.They represent the wisdom of our race."
Author: Stanley Kunitz

47. "The idea that the creative endeavor and mind-altering substances are entwined is one of the great pop-intellectual myths of our time. ... Substance abusing writers are just substance abusers — common garden variety drunks and druggies, in other words. Any claims that the drugs and alcohol are necessary to dull a finer sensibility are just the usual self-serving bullshit. I've heard alcoholic snowplow drivers make the same claim, that they drink to still the demons."
Author: Stephen King

48. "A glorious place, a glorious age, I tell you! A very Neon renaissance - And the myths that actually touched you at that time - not Hercules, Orpheus, Ulysses and Aeneas - but Superman, Captain Marvel, and Batman."
Author: Tom Wolfe

49. "This irritated or puzzled such students of literature and their professors as were accustomed to ‘serious' courses replete with ‘trends ' and ‘schools ' and ‘myths ' and ‘symbols ' and ‘social comment ' and something unspeakably spooky called ‘climate of thought.' Actually these ‘serious' courses were quite easy ones with the students required to know not the books but about the books."
Author: Vladimir Nabokov

50. "As an empiricist I continue to think of the conceptual scheme of science as a tool, ultimately, for predicting future experience in the light of past experience. Physical objects are conceptually imported into the situation as convenient intermediaries-not by definition in terms of experience, but simply as irreducible posits comparable, epistemologically, to the gods of Homer. For my part I do, qua lay physicist, believe in physical objects and not in Homer's gods; and I consider it a scientific error to believe otherwise. But in point of epistemological footing the physical objects and the gods differ only in degree and not in kind. Both sorts of entities enter our conception only as cultural posits. The myth of physical objects is epistemologically superior to most in that it has proved more efficacious than other myths as a device for working a manageable structure into the flux of experience."
Author: Willard Van Orman Quine

Myths Quotes Pictures