Myth Quotes - Page 24

• 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.

  10 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  16 Copy quote

• 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.

  7 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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.

  20 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  299 Copy quote

• 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

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  31 Copy quote

• Now, of course, the great thing about the solar system as a frontier is that there are no Indians, so you can have all the glory of the myth of the American westward expansion without any of the guilt.

  Sarah Zettel

  Guilt, Expansion, Glory

  85 Copy quote

• Hitler is still such a popular man; we are afraid of the Hitler myth. We want to give to the German people and to the world the final proof by means of the Supreme Court-Martial and its verdict.

  Walther von Brauchitsch

  Mean, Men, People

  "Trial of the Major War Criminals Before the International Military Tribunal", Nuremberg, Germany, (p. 203), 1947.

  9 Copy quote

  Show source

• Let us embrace Science and the new technologies unfettered, for it is these which will liberate mankind from the myth of god, and free us from our age old fears, from disease, death and the sweat of labor.

  Claude Vorilhon

  Science, Technology, Sweat

  4 Copy quote

• Everything is grounded in mystery. Everything is swimming, and the stable does not exist. Life is a series of guesses, and there is mystery in a match. The commonplace is the habitual, and the habitual is a mystery that has grown stale from sense-insistence. Life undulates; there is no such thing as a level; a straight line is a myth, and all directions are indirections.

  Benjamin De Casseres

  Eye, Swimming, Cells

  "Chameleon: Being a Book of My Selves".

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• The whole westward expansion myth is seen as romantic. But its a joke, a blot on American history.

  Frank Waters

  Expansion, American History, Whole

  65 Copy quote

• It is a myth that alcoholics have some spontaneous insight and then seek treatment. Victims of this disease do not submit to treatment out of spontaneous insight - typically, in our experience they come to their recognition scenes through a buildup of crises that crash through their almost impenetrable defense systems. They are forced to seek help; and when they don't, they perish miserably.

  Vernon Johnson

  Defense, Disease, Recognition

  6 Copy quote

• Black racism is a myth created by whites to ease their guilt feelings. As long as whites can be assured that blacks are racists, they can find reasons to justify their own oppression of’ black people.

  James H. Cone

  White, Long, Racism

  James H. Cone “Black Theology and Black Power”, Orbis Books

  77 Copy quote

  Show source

• The flood will lift the ghosts from the Hollywood lawn cemetery and they will disappear like ether in the now dead air. All the names will be erased from the billboards and the theatres and the piers and the magazines and the monuments. You live by myths of immortality, and your myths are not safe.

  Robert Montgomery

  Air, Names, Theatre

  14 Copy quote

• I look at the story, I look at the idea and just try to think of it in terms of that whole body of myth and see where the characters fit in and what they ought to be doing-all those archetypes are there to play with.

  John Boorman

  Character, Thinking, Play

  26 Copy quote

• What with the political monopoly, the Cheka and the Red Army, all that now existed of the 'Commune-State' of our dreams was a theoretical myth. The war, the internal measures against counterrevolution, and the famine (which had created a bureaucratic rationing apparatus) had killed off Soviet democracy. How could it revive, and when? The Party lived in the certain knowledge that the slightest relaxation of its authority would give day to reaction.

  Victor Serge

  Dream, War, Party

  Victor Serge (2002). “Memoirs of a Revolutionary”, p.133, University of Iowa Press

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• We must not be hampered by yesterday's myths in concentrating on today's needs.

  Harold Geneen

  Yesterday, Needs, Today

  10 Copy quote

• The standardized American is largely a myth created not least by Americans themselves.

  Irwin Edman

  Inspirational

  Irwin Edman (1968). “The Uses of Philosophy: An Irwin Edman Reader”

  4 Copy quote

  Show source

• Some are trapped in boxes of pea-sized Christianity, full of myths about missions that rob them of incentive to care about the unreached

  David Bryant

  Missionary, Incentives, Care

  David Bryant (1984). “In the gap: what it means to be a world Christian”

  49 Copy quote

  Show source

• But the myth of violent solutions as the ultimate solutions maintains itself in much of popular media.

  Stanley Crouch

  Media, Popular Song, Violent

  4 Copy quote

• Nothing will see us through the age we're entering but high consciousness, and that comes hard. We don't have a good, modern myth yet, and we need one.

  Robert Johnson

  Age, Needs, Entering

  14 Copy quote

• 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.

  17 Copy quote

  Show source

• I don't like the idea of drama schools. They only perpetuate the myth that everyone can do what I do

  Zach Braff

  Drama, School, Ideas

  4 Copy quote

• My mission was always intended to be slightly outside the public eye, because that makes me appear more interesting than I really am. A lot of people don’t realise that merely by staying away, you can create a myth.

  Julian Cope

  Eye, People, Interesting

  "Julian Cope, the hit who became a myth". Interview with Andrew Perry, www.telegraph.co.uk. July 1, 2010.

  6 Copy quote

  Show source