Myth Quotes - Page 31

• Jesus Christ is the most famous Jew of all time, but is today remembered as a Christian. Surprisingly, the Jewish community has accepted this distortion of history, and tends to regard Jesus as an apostate. How odd that the Jews would accept a Christian version of one of their brethren rather than seeking to discover the man entombed beneath the myth.

  Shmuley Boteach

  Christian, Jesus, Men

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• (I am) dealing not with the particular anecdote, but rather with the Spirit of Myth, which is generic to all myths at all times.

  Mark Rothko

  Anecdotes, Spirit, All Time

  "Abstract Expressionism". Book by David Anfam, Thames and Hudson Ltd London, p. 81, 1990.

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• One of the most insidious myths in American wine culture is that a wine is good if you like it. Liking a wine has nothing to do with whether it is good. Liking a wine has to do with liking that wine, period. Wine requires two assessments: one subjective, the other objective. In this it is like literature. You may not like reading Shakespeare but agree that Shakespeare was a great writer nonetheless.

  Karen MacNeil

  Reading, Wine, Two

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• Real myths are often strange and startlingly unfamiliar, and don't always give up their meanings easily; you have to tease them out, and for me, that's one of the pleasures of reading older collections of lore.

  Elizabeth Hand

  Giving Up, Real, Reading

  On "Mortal Love" at HarperCollins, 2004.

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• Those who claim absolutism is merely a myth are right that it has been misused simply as a byword for political centralisation.

  Peter Wilson

  Political, Absolutism, Claims

  Peter Wilson (2002). “Absolutism in Central Europe”, p.13, Routledge

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• That's how myths are born. Out of our carelessness, out of our tattered nerves, out of jokes that go wrong and flashy gestures.

  Sergei Lukyanenko

  Nerves, Gestures, Born

  Sergei Lukyanenko (2006). “Night Watch”, Miramax

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• Even by proving that a certain view is indispensable for living well, one proves merely that the view in question is a salutary myth: one does not prove it to be true.

  Leo Strauss

  Views, Doe, Certain

  Leo Strauss (1953). “Natural Right and History”, p.6, University of Chicago Press

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• Fairy tales and myths are forms of cultural storage for the natural history of life.

  William Irwin Thompson

  History Of Life, Fairy Tale, Natural

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• The moment there is imagination there is myth

  Camille Paglia

  Imagination, Stereotype, Moments

  Camille Paglia (1990). “Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson”, Vintage

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• Dialectic, which is the parent of logic, came itself from rhetoric. Rhetoric is in turn the child of the myths and poetry of ancient Greece. That is so historically, and that is so by any application of common sense. The poetry and myths are the response of a prehistoric people to the Universe around them made on the basis of Quality. It is Quality, not dialectic, which is the generator of everything we know.

  Robert M. Pirsig

  Children, People, Common Sense

  "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance". Book by Robert M. Pirsig, 1974.

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• ...there are still truths in the Bible and many other ancient texts despite what religions have done to destroy and debase them. Religious dogma and myth have been used very successfully either to suppress understanding or to twist the truth sufficiently to turn something positive into something negative.

  David Icke

  Religious, Understanding, Twists

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• In a sense, every human construction, whether mental or material, is a component in a landscape of fear because it exists in constant chaos. Thus children's fairy tales as well as adult's legends, cosmological myths, and indeed philosophical systems are shelters built by the mind in which human beings can rest, at least temporarily, from the siege of inchoate experience and of doubt.

  Yi-Fu Tuan

  Children, Philosophical, Mind

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• Spider-Man is a genuine American myth with a dark, primal power, but it's also got this great superhero, and - hey! - he can fly through the theater at 40 miles an hour. It's got villains, it's got skyscrapers, it's colorful, it's Manhattan. I knew it would be a challenge, but I saw the inherent theatricality in it, and I couldn't resist.

  Julie Taymor

  Dark, Men, Superhero

  "KA-POW! Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark" by Adam Green, www.vogue.com. November 12, 2010.

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• Though [Charles Guignebert] could not accept either the Christ myth theory, which held that no historical Jesus existed, or the Dutch Radical denial that Paul authored any of the epistles, Guignebert took both quite seriously.

  Robert M. Price

  Jesus, Historical, Denial

  "The New Encyclopedia of Unbelief". Book by Tom Flynn, 2007.

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• It is a myth that style can't be learnt. It's all about dressing for your body shape, following the rules and wearing colours that suit your skin tone.

  Susannah Constantine

  Skin Tone, Style, Skins

  "Mistresses of the makeover". Interview with Cathrin Schaer, www.nzherald.co.nz. February 19, 2008.

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• Anthropologists have promulgated the myth of the peaceful savage so effectively that when actual deaths by war are tabulated for prestate simple societies, one is astonished by how such a notion can continue to be taught to students.

  Lloyd deMause

  War, Simple, Peaceful

  "The Emotional Life of Nations". Book by Lloyd deMause, 2002.

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• Prostitution myths justify the existence of prostitution, promote misinformation about prostitution, and contribute to a social climate that exploits and harms not only prostituted women but all women.

  Melissa Farley

  Climate, Social, Prostitution

  "Attitudes Toward Prostitution and Acceptance of Rape Myths". Journal of Applied Social Psychology Vol. 32, issue 9, Abstract, onlinelibrary.wiley.com. September 2002.

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• It seems far simpler to go ahead and say that the epic is a fantastic myth, that happens to be true of the material Universe, that other myths are true in terms of their cultural meaning, and that there's absolutely no problem with holding more than one story, just as there's no problem with viewing the sunset in terms of planetary rotation and spectra and nuclear fusions one moment and as visual splendor the next.

  Ursula Goodenough

  Sunset, Epic, Fusion

  "Board Forum: How Grand a Narrative?". 1999.

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• In times of violence, personal predilections for niceties of colour and form seem irrelevant. All primitive expression (like the myths) reveals the constant awareness of powerful forces, the immediate presence of terror and fear.

  Adolph Gottlieb

  Powerful, Expression, Violence

  "bstract Expressionism Creators and Critics". Book edited by Clifford Ross, Abrams Publishers New York, 1990.

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• The myth of Canada, its hidden story, is of a contemplative country, a place of inwardness, where people can question the idea of nationhood and ponder what values we wish to see expressed and achieved, and what solitudes of identity and reverie we wish to preserve.

  B. W. Powe

  Country, Ideas, People

  "Towards a Canada of Light". Book by Bruce W. Powe, 2006.

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• The more real things get, the more like myths they become.

  Rainer Werner Fassbinder

  Real, Real Things

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• Whereas Absurdism in Europe seemed a logical, almost inevitable response to the irrationality of war, the analogous elements that surfaced in American drama seemed more a response to a materialist society run amok. The American-style Absurdism seemed to spring full-blown out of television advertisements and situation comedies, which had become new myth-making machines.

  Arnold Aronson

  Running, Spring, War

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• Oral myths are closer to the genetic conclusions than the often ambiguous scientific evidence of archaeology.

  Bryan Sykes

  Evidence, Ambiguous, Archaeology

  Bryan Sykes (2007). “Saxons, Vikings, and Celts: The Genetic Roots of Britain and Ireland”, p.21, W. W. Norton & Company

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• The collective unconscious appears to consist of mythological motifs or primordial images, for which reason the myths of all nations are its real exponents. In fact the whole of mythology could be taken as a sort of projection of the collective unconscious. We can see this most clearly if we look at the heavenly constellations, whose originally chaotic forms are organized through the projection of images. This explains the influence of the stars as asserted by astrologers. These influences are nothing but unconscious instrospective perceptions of the collective unconscious.

  Carl Jung

  Stars, Real, Taken

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• Some batters, and good ones too, scoff at the whole theory of place hitting, calling it a myth. They are wrong, however.

  Edd Roush

  Calling, Hitting, Theory

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