Myth Quotes - Page 21

• 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.

  Jacques Audiard

  Art, Children, Father

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• It is our stories that will recreate us, when we are torn, hurt, even destroyed. It is the storyteller, the dream-maker, the myth-maker, that is our phoenix, that represents us at our best, and at our most creative.

  Doris Lessing

  Dream, Hurt, Phoenix

  "A hunger for books" by Doris Lessing, www.theguardian.com. December 8, 2007.

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• God doesn't start wars. That's the greatest load of nonsense. Mankind starts wars. But then we bless armies to go and kill in God's name. Somebody's got to blow that myth out of the water.

  Betty Williams

  War, Army, Blow

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• I agree with people like Richard Dawkins that mankind felt the need for creation myths. Before we really began to understand disease and the weather and things like that, we sought false explanations for them. Now science has filled in some of the realm – not all – that religion used to fill.

  Bill Gates

  Filled In, Weather, People

  Interview with Jeff Goodell, www.rollingstone.com. March 13, 2014.

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• Writing is self-reinforcing. Don't make a fetish out of it, and don't surrender to the myth of the garret, or the myth of the chained muse. It's like playing the guitar, or practicing taekwondo, or having sex. The more you do, the better you get. The better you get, the better it feels. The better it feels, the more you want to do.

  Jay Lake

  Sex, Writing, Guitar

  Interview with Patrick Wolohan, www.sfsignal.com. August 24, 2009.

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• You need music, I don't know why. It's probably one of those Joe Campbell questions, why we need ritual. We need magic, and bliss, and power, myth, and celebration and religion in our lives, and music is a good way to encapsulate a lot of it.

  Jerry Garcia

  Life, Music, Power

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• 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.

  C. S. Lewis

  Ideas, Perfection, Mind

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• It may be said that myths give to the transcendent reality an immanent, this-worldly objectivity. Myths speak about gods and demons as powers on which man knows himself to be dependent, powers whose favors he needs, powers whose wrath he fears. Myths express the knowledge that man is not master of the world and his life, that the world within which he lives is full of riddles and mysteries and that human life also is full of riddles and mysteries.

  Rudolf Bultmann

  Men, Reality, Wrath

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• There is no line between the 'real world' and 'world of myth and symbol.' Objects, sensations, hit with the impact of hallucination.

  William S. Burroughs

  Real, Impact, World

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• Capitalism’s grow-or-die imperative stands radically at odds with ecology’s imperative of interdependence and limit. The two imperatives can no longer coexist with each other; nor can any society founded on the myth that they can be reconciled hope to survive. Either we will establish an ecological society or society will go under for everyone, irrespective of his or her status.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Odds, Two, Limits

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• 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... within I don't know how many years, but in not too long a time, it's going to become basic common sense that you are not some alien being who confronts an external world that is not you, but that almost every intelligent person will have the feeling of being an activity of the entire universe.

  Alan Watts

  Intelligent, Years, Taught Us

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• It helps to regard soul as an active intelligence, forming and plotting each person's fate. Translators use "plot" to render the ancient Greek word mythos in English. The plots that entangle our souls and draw forth our characters are the great myths. That is why we need a sense of myth and knowledge of different myths to gain insight into our epic struggles, our misalliances, and our tragedies. Myths show the imaginative structures inside our messes, and our human characters can locate themselves against the background of the characters of myth.

  James Hillman

  Struggle, Character, Fate

  James Hillman (2012). “The Force of Character: And the Lasting Life”, p.11, Ballantine Books

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• Just as the introduction of the irrational numbers ... is a convenient myth [which] simplifies the laws of arithmetic ... so physical objects are postulated entities which round out and simplify our account of the flux of existence... The conceptional scheme of physical objects is [likewise] a convenient myth, simpler than the literal truth and yet containing that literal truth as a scattered part.

  Willard Van Orman Quine

  Math, Numbers, Law

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• I have yet to encounter that common myth of weak men, an insurmountable barrier.

  James Lane Allen

  Power, Men, Weak Man

  James Lane Allen (2005). “The Choir Invisible”, p.30, 1st World Publishing

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• To be an American (unlike being English or French or whatever) is precisely to imagine a destiny rather than to inherit one; since we have always been, insofar as we are Americans at all, inhabitants of myth rather than history.

  Leslie Fiedler

  Destiny, America, Imagine

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• There's so much myth and baloney. Like a 80-year-old man able to manhandle a 300-pounder with his little finger. Ridiculous. Or this matter of breaking bricks and boards wth the edge of your hand. Now I ask you, did you ever see a brick or a board pick a fight with anybody?

  Bruce Lee

  Fighting, Men, Hands

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• The idea of a liberal media bias is simply a myth. If only it were true, we might have a more humane, open-minded, and ultimately effective public debate on the issues facing the country.

  Barbra Streisand

  Country, Media, Ideas

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• It is difficult to separate, at times, the myth from the truth.

  Bob Kane

  Separation, Difficult

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• The Rising was mainly a piece of streat theatre designed by poets for dramatic effect. For better or worse, it became part of the founding myth which states need - but which they should move on from after a time. Major John MacBride, in a cameo performance in which he left Jacobs Mill, as he had entered it, immaculately dressed down to the white spats, told his colleagues Next time lads, don't shut yourself up behind four walls. It was good advice.

  Maurice Hayes

  Wall, Moving, White

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• That image of the common drunk is a myth. There is a thing called a maintenance drinker which may very well be a mother of four, a welder or a distinguished business person. These people build up a tolerance and manage to still maintain their daily lifestyles while constantly struggling with this disease, because it is a recognized disease by the American Medical Association.

  Lisa Anderson

  Mother, Struggle, People

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• There's an elegiac quality in watching [American wilderness] go, because it's our own myth, the American frontier, that's deteriorating before our eyes. I feel a deep sorrow that my kids will never get to see what I've seen, and their kids will see nothing; there's a deep sadness whenever I look at nature now.

  Peter Matthiessen

  Eye, Sadness, Kids

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• Kill off the sacred bear. Kill off the ancestral crocodile. Kill off the myth-wrapped tiger. Kill off the lion. You haven't conquered a people, or their place, until you've exterminated their resident monsters.

  David Quammen

  People, Monsters, Lions

  David Quammen (2004). “Monster of God: The Man-Eating Predator in the Jungles of History and the Mind”, p.254, W. W. Norton & Company

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• The history of an oppressed people is hidden in the lies and the agreed myth of its conquerors.

  Meridel Le Sueur

  Lying, People, Oppression

  Meridel Le Sueur, Elaine Hedges (1990). “Ripening: Selected Work”, p.66, Feminist Press at CUNY

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• It is my belief that we need a new transnational sustaining 'myth' that can impart value and respect. It is my further belief that we are coming to see our universe and life as creative, without a directing agency. Meaning emerges with life. If this view becomes widespread, it has the promise to become the sustaining myth we need to sustain in turn an emerging global civilization.

  Stuart Kauffman

  Agency, Views, Civilization

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• Global warming is a false myth and every serious person and scientist says so. It is not fair to refer to the U.N. panel. IPCC is not a scientific institution: it’s a political body, a sort of non-government organization of green flavor. It’s neither a forum of neutral scientists nor a balanced group of scientists. These people are politicized scientists who arrive there with a one-sided opinion and a one-sided assignment.

  Vaclav Klaus

  Government, Serious Person, Organization

  "Global Warming: A Convenient Lie" by Andrew Gavin Marshall, www.globalresearch.ca. March 15, 2007.

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