Quotes About Myths

“Beneath all the chatter and the liturgy runs a fierce nostalgia for the literary myths of the past, for the gigantic figures of Dickens and Joyce, Hemingway and Faulkner. A writer can't even aim at that kind of aura today. But it's that yearning for imagined greatness that drives the whole literary enterprise. Plus the publishers' desperation to manufacture a bestseller to pay the bills. The idea of greatness is a marketing tool. See Franzen.”

— Tim Parks

“English teachers, workshops, and myths try to make writers slow down. We are the ONLY ART on the planet that tells young artists to not practice and do less to get better. Head-shaking in its stupidity. And new writers buy into that.”

— Dean Wesley Smith

“My body lies within the strings and myths of reality with a purpose of evolution and adapted by gravity but for my conscious's matrix is without any doubt has adapted to other's consciousness and that is how we all adapt to survival.”

— Ahmed Aziz Ahmed

“Isn't this enough? Just this world? Just this beautiful, complex wonderfully unfathomable world? How does it so fail to hold our attention that we have to diminish it with the invention of cheap, man-made myths and monsters?”

— Tim Minchin

“Others with names like myths, names like puzzles, names we had never heard before: Virgilio, Balamugunthan, Faheem, Abdulrahman, Aziz, Baako, Dae-Hyun, Ousmane, Kimatsu. When it was hard to say the many strange names, we called them by their countries.
So how on earth do you do this, Sri Lanka?
Mexico, are you coming or what?
Is it really true you sold a kidney to come to America, India?
Guys, just give Tshaka Zulu a break, the guy is old, I'm just saying.
We know you despise this job, Sudan, but deal with it, man.
Come, Ethiopia, move, move, move; Israel, Kazakhstn, Niger, brothers, let's go!”

— NoViolet Bulawayo

“Suffering does not ennoble. It destroys. To resist destruction, self-hatred, or lifelong hopelessness, we have to throw off the conditioning of being despised, the fear of becoming the they that is talked about so dismissively, to refuse lying myths and easy moralities, to see ourselves as human, flawed, and extraordinary. All of us extraordinary”

— Dorothy Allison

“It is not enough for journalists to see themselves as mere messengers without understanding the hidden agendas of the message and the myths that surround it.”

— John Pilger

“Our fears are informed by history and economics, by social power and stigma, by myths and nightmares. And as with other strongly held beliefs, our fears are dear to us. When we encounter information that contradicts our beliefs, as Slovic found in one of his studies, we tend to doubt the information, not ourselves.”

— Eula Biss

“The truth about an animal is far more exciting and altogether more beautiful than all the myths woven about it.”

— Konrad Lorenz

“From that imbalance rose the tragic results of the coming together of two worlds. It was the extermination of an ancient dream by the frenzy of a modern one, the destruction of myths by a desire for power. It was gold, modern weapons, and rational thought pitted against magic and gods: the outcome could not have been otherwise.”

— Jean-Marie G. Le Clézio

“A myth is a way of making sense in a senseless world. Myths are narrative patterns that give significance to our existence.”

— Rollo May

“For some reason we human beings seem to learn best how to love when we're a bit broken, when our plans fall apart, when our myths of our self-sufficiency and goodness and safety are shattered.”

— Kathleen Norris

“I've always thought of wholeness and integration as necessary myths. We're fragmented beings who cement ourselves together, but there are always cracks. Living with the cracks is part of being, well, reasonably healthy”

— Siri Hustvedt

“After a childhood reading fairy tales and myths, is it any wonder that when I began to write my own stories I included fairy tales? Fairy tales are storytelling at its most basic. They've been with mankind for as long as people have told stories to each other. Fairy tales speak to something intrinsic in humans-they touch our most primitive selves. How else to explain that the Cinderella story is told in nearly every society on earth? To think of fairy tales as merely stories for children is to ignore thousands of years when fairy tales were used to teach morality, to warn, and to entertain both children and adults.”

— Elizabeth Hoyt

“Feynman resented the polished myths of most scientific history, submerging the false steps and halting uncertainties under a surface of orderly intellectual progress, but he created a myth of his own.”

— James Gleick

“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.”

— Ray Bradbury

“While I generally find that great myths are great precisely because they represent and embody great universal truths (and will explore several such myths later in this book), the myth of romantic love is a dreadful lie. Perhaps it is a necessary lie in that it ensures the survival of the species by its encouragement and seeming validation of the falling-in-love experience that traps us into marriage. But as a psychiatrist I weep in my heart almost daily for the ghastly confusion and suffering that this myth fosters. Millions of people waste vast amounts of energy desperately and futilely attempting to make the reality of their lives conform to the unreality of the myth.”

— M. Scott Peck

“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.”

— Ann Druyan

“The problem is the myths of Area 51 are hard to dispute if no one can speak on the record about what actually happened there.”

— Annie Jacobsen

“The place that the shepherds found was not an academy or an abstract republic, it was not a place of myths allegorised or dissected or explained or explained away. It was a place of dreams come true.”

— G.K. Chesterton

“I want to clear up a few myths about myself. People have written that I was a kindergarten teacher and a former Miss Texas, and neither is true.”

— Krista Allen

“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.”

— L. Frank Baum

“Fiction isn't made by scraping the bones of topicality for the last shreds and sinews, to be processed into mechanically recovered prose. Like journalism, it deals in ideas as well as facts, but also in metaphors, symbols and myths.”

— Hilary Mantel

“There are so many myths out there about Marianne Faithfull, I had to, um, detach. But I can turn it on because Marianne Faithfull is really an attitude, you know.”

— Marianne Faithfull

“The dogma of woman's complete historical subjection to men must be rated as one of the most fantastic myths ever created by the human mind.”

— Mary Ritter Beard

“I suffered from other kinds of pangs. I was prone to the most excessive dreaming, of such intensity and realism that when I awakened I felt I lost an entire universe of legends, myths, figures and cities of such color that they made our room seem a thousand times more bare, the poverty of the table more acute.”

— Anaïs Nin

“It began to strike me that the point of my education was a kind of discomfort, was the process that would not award me my own especial Dream but would break all the dreams, all the comforting myths of Africa, of America, and everywhere, and would leave me only with humanity in all its terribleness. And there was so much terrible out there, even among us. You must understand this.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

“We'd need to leave fast. The biggest hurdle would be finding a ship. Passages across the Atlantic didn't always work out. The Black Sea wasn't easy to cross either. The ancient Greeks called it Pontos Axenos, the Hostile Sea. In our day and age, Greek myths were lifesaving required reading, and I'd read enough of them to know that the Black Sea wasn't a fun place.
"Where on the Black Sea?"
"Georgia."
Colchis. Bodyguard detail in the land of the Golden Fleece, dragons, and witches, where the Argonauts had sailed and nearly died.”

— Ilona Andrews

“Myths have a way of bringing what is unconscious to the surface and putting a face on what we cannot see.”

— Terry Tempest Williams

“There are black marriages that are still going strong 40 years later. You hear so many myths that there aren't any people making it, but there are. As long as there are some, there's hope.”

— Jill Scott

“Two of the human race's greatest myths: the possibility of permanence, and the simplicity of human nature.”

— Tana French

“I liked Latin, I like languages, I liked all the myths, and the Roman tales that we were required to translate in Latin, and all these interesting people who were never quite what they thought they would be or seemed to be.”

— Suzanne Farrell

“There are a lot of myths about my injuries. They say I have broken every bone in my body. Not true. But I have broken 35 bones. I had surgery 14 times to pin and plate. I shattered my pelvis. I forget all of the things that have broke.”

— Evel Knievel

“Religious sentiments are many a times much above reality. All are aware of reality but blinded by faith and faith has always led to many a myths become reality.”

— Amit Abraham

“Men do not invent Myths. They only invent fables, and tell lies. True Myths create themselves, and find their expression in the men who serve their purpose.”

— Denis Johnston

“Anti-European politicians tell more myths and fantasies about Europe than you can find in Harry Potter or The Da Vinci Code.”

— Denis MacShane

“The myths about Hades and the gods, though they are pure invention, help to make men virtuous.”

— Diodorus Siculus

“Creation myths are not about the origins of the world at all, but about the origins of patriarchy which has claimed itself as the world”

— Jane Caputi

“A part of what makes myths live is their multiplicity, the way different voices retell them in every generation. Homer survives because his poetry was outstanding, yes, but also because he's been passed down by so many by luminaries like Vergil and Ovid, Shakespeare, James Joyce and Margaret Atwood, but also by countless others. I wanted to do my part for these tremendous stories.”

— Madeline Miller

“The reverse process is extremely important to me - that artistic images can inspire to words and different myths, and that in certain cultures this process has been the normal relation between images and words.”

— Asger Jorn

“There are myths about kids spending time online - that it is dangerous or making them lazy. But we found that spending time online is essential for young people to pick up the social and technical skills they need to be competent citizens in the digital age.”

— Mizuko Ito

“I'm always interested in debunking myths if they are untrue. But it's also important to identify myths and how they function, what value they may have.”

— Neal Ascherson

“I do think that this represents a kind of shift towards myth, a recovery of myth, largely through the popularity of writers like Philip Pullman. Somehow myths have returned as a serious subject. It used to be scorned ... really scorned. It was part of a nursery tradition, and it was also rather tainted - but not in an immovable way - by the association with right-wing ideologies after the World Wars.”

— Marina Warner

“Symbols are specific acts or figures, while myths develop and elaborate these symbols into a story which contains characters and several episodes. The myth is thus more inclusive. But both symbol and myth have the same function psychologically; they are man's way of expressing the quintessence of his experience - his way of seeing his life, his self-image and his relations to the world of his fellow men and of nature - in a total figure which at the same moment carries the vital meaning of this experience.”

— Rollo May

“Various kinds of self-forgetting, usually accompanied by illusions and myths, make it possible to live without the intransigent facing of death-in the sense of always thinking about it and what it means for life and the things dear in life-which is characteristic of a serious life.”

— Allan Bloom

“Facts are subversive. Subversive of the claims made by democratically elected leaders as well as dictators, by biographers and autobiographers, spies and heroes, torturers and post-modernists. Subversive of lies, half-truths, myths; of all those easy speeches that comfort cruel men.”

— Timothy Garton Ash

“Myths are the world's dreams. They are archetypal dreams and deal with great human problems. Myths and dreams come from the same place. They come from realizations of some kind that then have to find expression in symbolic form.”

— Joseph Campbell

“Myths are clues to the spiritual potentialities of the human life.”

— Joseph Campbell

“We live in our myths, we only endure reality.”

— Robert Anton Wilson

“Historically speaking all - or very nearly all - scientific theories originate from myths.”

— Karl Popper