Myth Quotes - Page 17

• As is so often the case with a legend, every incident has two possible interpretations, the plausible and the one that is molded to suit the making of the myth. Man is a romantic at heart and will always put aside dull, plodding reason for the excitement of an enigma. As Doc had pointed out, mystery, not logic, is what gives us hope and keeps us believing in a force greater than our own insignificance.

  Bryce Courtenay

  Believe, Heart, Men

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• Life knows us not and we do not know life—-we don’t know even our own thoughts. Half the words we use have no meaning whatever and of the other half each man understands each word after the fashion of his own folly and conceit. Faith is a myth and beliefs shift like mists on the shore; thoughts vanish; words, once pronounced, die; and the memory of yesterday is as shadowy as the hope of tomorrow

  Joseph Conrad

  Fashion, Memories, Men

  Joseph Conrad (2015). “The Selected Letters of Joseph Conrad”, p.89, Cambridge University Press

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• Art is the Western myth, with which we both console ourselves and make ourselves.

  Zadie Smith

  Art, Western, Console

  Zadie Smith (2006). “On Beauty”, p.170, Penguin UK

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• THAT Perseus always won. That's why my momhad named me after him, even if he was son of Zeus ann I was son of Posidon. The original Perseus was one of the only heros in the greek myths who got a happy ending. The others died-betrayed, mauled, mutilated, poisoned, or cursed by the gods. My mom hoped i would inherit Perseus's luck. Judging by how my life was going so far, i wasn't too optimistic.

  Rick Riordan

  Mom, Hero, Optimistic

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

  Rollo May

  Giving, World, Patterns

  Rollo May (1991). “The Cry for Myth”, p.15, W. W. Norton & Company

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• It is interesting to note how many of the great scientific discoveries begin as myths.

  Rollo May

  Discovery, Interesting, Existentialism

  Rollo May (1991). “The Cry for Myth”, p.25, W. W. Norton & Company

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• The truth of a myth...is not in its words but its patterns.

  David Mitchell

  Patterns

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• With the moon walk, the religious myth that sustained these notions could no longer be held. With our view of earthrise, we could see that the earth and the heavens were no longer divided but that the earth is in the heavens. (105)

  Joseph Campbell

  Inspirational, Religious, Moon

  Joseph Campbell (2001). “Thou Art that: Transforming Religious Metaphor”, p.105, New World Library

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• First bubble baths. Now Disney parks. You're shattering every creep vampire myth I've ever heard.

  Jeaniene Frost

  Vampire, Parks, Firsts

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• I don't know how you perceive my mission as a writer, but for me it is not a responsibility to reaffirm your concretized myths and provincial prejudices. It is not my job to lull you with a false sense of the rightness of the universe. This wonderful and terrible occupation of recreating the world in a different way, each time fresh and strange, is an act of revolutionary guerrilla warfare. I stir the soup. I inconvenience you. I make your nose run and your eyes water.

  Harlan Ellison

  Running, Jobs, Responsibility

  "Shatterday: Stories". Book by Harlan Ellison, April 1, 2014.

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• The most important human endeavor is the striving for morality in our actions. Our inner balance and even our very existence depend on it. Only morality in our actions can give beauty and dignity to life. To make this a living force and bring it to clear consciousness is perhaps the foremost task of education. The foundation of morality should not be made dependent on myth nor tied to any authority lest doubt about the myth or about the legitimacy of the authority imperil the foundation of sound judgment and action.

  Albert Einstein

  Giving, Doubt, Balance

  Albert Einstein (2013). “Albert Einstein, The Human Side: Glimpses from His Archives”, p.95, Princeton University Press

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• [Comedies], in the ancient world, were regarded as of a higher rank than tragedy, of a deeper truth, of a more difficult realization, of a sounder structure, and of a revelation more complete. The happy ending of the fairy tale, the myth, and the divine comedy of the soul, is to be read, not as a contradiction, but as a transcendence of the universal tragedy of man. ...Tragedy is the shattering of the forms and of our attachment to the forms...

  Joseph Campbell

  Inspirational, Men, Joy

  "The Hero with a Thousand Faces" by Joseph Campbell, New World Library, (Ch. 2), 1949.

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• Throughout history, works of art have been stolen under mysterious circumstances...Said by some to be the work of "Phantom" thieves... ...Others dismiss it as mere myth. But in this country, the stories are all too true. The name of this mysterious thief? "Dark." And his true identity? No one knows.

  Yukiru Sugisaki

  Country, Art, Dark

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• It was a rainy night. It was the myth of the rainy night.

  Jack Kerouac

  Night, Rainy, Rainy Night

  "On the Road".

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• 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

  Understanding, Agendas, Messengers

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• As long as there is still one beggar around, there will still be myth.

  Walter Benjamin

  Long, Beggar, Stills

  Walter Benjamin, Rolf Tiedemann (1999). “The Arcades Project”, p.404, Harvard University Press

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• I made art a philosophy, and philosophy an art: I altered the minds of men, and the colour of things: I awoke the imagination of my century so that it created myth and legend around me: I summed up all things in a phrase, all existence in an epigram: whatever I touched I made beautiful

  Oscar Wilde

  Beautiful, Art, Philosophy

  Oscar Wilde, Russell Jackson, Ian Small (2000). “The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde: De profundis, "Epistola : in carcere et vinculis"”, p.95, Oxford University Press on Demand

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• Wolves don't hunt singly, but always in pairs. The lone wolf was a myth.

  John Fowles

  Pairs, Lone Wolf, Hunts

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• ...it seemed to me I was living in an insane asylum of my own making. I wnt about with all these fantastic figures: centaurs, nymphs, satyrs, gods and goddesses, as though they were patients and I was analyzing them. I read a Greek or Negro myth as if a lunatic were telling me his anamnesis.

  Carl Jung

  Nymphs, Greek, Insane

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• India, the new myth--a collective fiction in which anything was possible, a fable rivalled only by the two other mighty fantasies: money and God.

  Salman Rushdie

  Two, Fables, India

  Salman Rushdie (2010). “Midnight's Children”, p.150, Random House

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• A great deal has been said about love at first sight; I am perfectly aware of love's retrospective tendency to make a legend of itself, turn its beginnings into myth; so I don't want to assert that it was love; but I have no doubt there was a kind of clairvoyance at work: I immediately felt, sensed, grasped the essence of Lucie's being or, to be more precise, the essence of what she was later to become for me; Lucie had revealed herself to me the way religious truth reveals itself.

  Milan Kundera

  Religious, Sight, Essence

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• 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.

  Joseph Campbell

  Dream, Peculiar, Way

  "The Hero with a Thousand Faces" by Joseph Campbell, New World Library, (Ch. 1), 1949.

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• The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact. The old myth of the Dying God, without ceasing to be a myth, comes down from the heaven of legend and imagination to the earth of history.

  C. S. Lewis

  Heart, Imagination, Heaven

  C. S. Lewis (1984). “The Business of Heaven: Daily Readings from C. S. Lewis”, p.314, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• 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.

  Robert Penn Warren

  Inspirational, Motivational, History

  Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren, James A. Grimshaw (1998). “Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren: A Literary Correspondence”, p.15, University of Missouri Press

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• Religion is not about accepting twenty impossible propositions before breakfast, but about doing things that change you. It is a moral aesthetic, an ethical alchemy. If you behave in a certain way, you will be transformed. The myths and laws of religion are not true because they they conform to some metaphysical, scientific or historical reality but because they are life enhancing. They tell you how human nature functions, but you will not discover their truth unless you apply these myths and doctrines to your own life and put them into practice.

  Karen Armstrong

  Life, Change, Truth

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