Myths quotes:

Send

Myths are public dreams, dreams are private myths. -- Joseph Campbell
Myths which are believed in tend to become true. -- George Orwell
Myths and creeds are heroic struggles to comprehend the truth in the world. -- Ansel Adams
Myths are stories that express meaning, morality or motivation. Whether they are true or not is irrelevant. -- Michael Shermer
Myths grow all the time. If I was to listen to the number of times I've thrown teacups then we've gone through some crockery in this place. It's completely exaggerated, but I don't like people arguing back with me. -- Alex Ferguson
Myths about the dire effects of genetically modified foods on health and the environment abound, but they have not held up to scientific scrutiny. And, although many concerns have been expressed about the potential for unexpected consequences, the unexpected effects that have been observed so far have been benign. -- Nina Fedoroff
Myths are lies that tell the truth. -- Phil Cousineau
Myths and legends die hard in America. -- Hunter S. Thompson
Myths are seldom simple, and never irresponsible. -- Robert Graves
Myths are experienced in ordinary life, as everyday epiphanies. -- Phil Cousineau
Myths are a waste of time. They prevent progression. -- Barbra Streisand
Myths are made for the imagination to breath life into them. -- Albert Camus
Myths are clues to the spiritual potentialities of the human life. -- Joseph Campbell
Myths are fun, as long as you don't confuse them with the truth. -- Richard Dawkins
Myths often do a lot of theoretical good, while they are still new. -- Gilbert Ryle
Myths are not to be despised, but reading them literally is not to be recommended. -- Peter Burke
Myths of the heroes speak most eloquently of man's quest to choose life over death. -- Dorothy Norman
Myths are early science, the result of men's first trying to explain what they saw around them. -- Edith Hamilton
People think boundaries and borders build nations. Nonsense-words do. Beliefs, declarations, constitutions-words. Stories. Myths. Lies. Promises. History -- Libba Bray
Myths, by their definition, involve transformations, struggles through various worlds or layers of reality and of obscuration. -- Anne Waldman
Scientific beliefs are supported by evidence, and they get results. Myths and faiths are not and do not. -- Richard Dawkins
Myths are wonderful - they really tell the stories that connect all of us and teach us so much. -- Jeff Bridges
The sea always offers up incredible stories of survivors' fortitude. Myths of a lot of countries have variations on that. -- Colin Farrell
Myths have a way of bringing what is unconscious to the surface and putting a face on what we cannot see. -- Terry Tempest Williams
Myths are wonderful tools that we've had, oh, for eons now that help us navigate the situations we find ourselves in. -- Jeff Bridges
A myth is a way of making sense in a senseless world. Myths are narrative patterns that give significance to our existence. -- Rollo May
Myths can't be translated as they did in their ancient soil. We can only find our own meaning in our own time. -- Margaret Atwood
[M]yths are not invented as stories are. Myths are inspired-they really are. They come from the same realm that dream comes from. -- Joseph Campbell
Myths are part of our DNA. We're a civilisation with a continuous culture. The effort to modernize it keeps it alive. Readers connect with it. -- Amish Tripathi
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
Myths are, in fact...neither primitive nor untrue. They are, rather, a kind of poetry that helps us make sense of the world and our place in it. -- Stephen H. Furrer
And then he tells her stories. Myths he learned from his instructor. Fantasies he created himself, inspired by bits and pieces of others read in archaic books with crackling spines. -- Erin Morgenstern
Myths are stories about people who become too big for their lives temporarily, so that they crash into other lives or brush against gods. In crisis their souls are visible. -- Anne Carson
Myths are so intimately bound to culture, time, and place that unless the symbols, the metaphors, are kept alive by constant recreation through the arts, the life just slips away from them. -- Joseph Campbell
Myths are stories that explain a natural phenomenon. Before humans found scientific explanations for such things as the moon and the sun and rainbows, they tried to understand them by telling stories. -- Jane Yolen
Myths that need clarification: "Everyone in California lives on a white, sandy beach." False. The only people who live on California beaches are vacationers from Arizona, Utah, and Nevada who own condos. -- Erma Bombeck
Unfortunately, too many executives believe the myths about trust. Myths like how trust is soft and is merely a social virtue. The reality is that trust is hard-edged and is an economic driver. -- Stephen Covey
Songs are like myths. Myths are useful because they allow you to cast yourself and your life and your own experience. And for some people, 'Fire and Rain' speaks to them in that way. -- James Taylor
Myths of the heroes are cosmic creation myths in microcosm. They depict, in no matter how subtle variation, the eternal battle we wage to release the creative energies within ourselves and in the world. -- Dorothy Norman
At Brandies I discovered Feminism. And I instantly became a convert... writing brilliant papers in my Myths of Patriarchy class, in which I likened my fate as a woman to other victims throughout the ages. -- Heather Hart
Myths are the prototype for all stories. When we write a story on our own it can't help but link up with all sorts of myths. Myths are like a reservoir containing every story there is. -- Haruki Murakami
Myths and science fulfill a similar function: they both provide human beings with a representation of the world and of the forces that are supposed to govern it. They both fix the limits of what is considered as possible. -- Francois Jacob
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, legends and stories are the signposts previous generations have left us so we don't have to figure out our own personal journey in solitude! They have to be metaphorical, because their interpretation will be different for each individual life! -- Fred Van Lente
Myths hook and bind the mind because at the same time they set the mind free: they explain the universe while allowing the universe to go on being unexplained; and we seem to need this even now, in our twentieth-century grandeur. -- Jeanette Winterson
Science shares with religion the claim that it answers deep questions about origins, the nature of life, and the cosmos. But there the resemblance ends. Scientific beliefs are supported by evidence, and they get results. Myths and faiths are not and do not. -- Richard Dawkins
Myths are public dreams; dreams are private myths. By finding your own dream and following it through, it will lead you to the myth-world in which you live. But just as in dream, the subject and object, though they seem to be separate, are really the same. -- Joseph Campbell
Mythology is composed by poets out of their insights and realizations. Mythologies are not invented; they are found. You can no more tell us what your dream is going to be tonight than we can invent a myth. Myths come from the mystical region of essential experience. -- Joseph Campbell
Humans live through their myths and only endure their realities. -- Robert Anton Wilson
I'm a big fan of the misunderstood, the vilified, the underdog, the breaking of myths. -- Dominic Monaghan
But because we live in an age of science, we have a preoccupation with corroborating our myths. -- Michael Shermer
So certainly, if we can tell evil stories to make people sick, we can also tell good myths that make them well. -- Rainer Werner Fassbinder
I think of evolution as a myth, like the Norse myths, the Greek myths - anybody's myths. But it was created for a rational age. -- Tom Wolfe
Congress acknowledged that society's accumulated myths and fears about disability and disease are as handicapping as are the physical limitations that flow from actual impairment. -- William J. Brennan, Jr.
I fell in love with words in all languages, and I read everything I could find, particularly myths and legends and histories and archeology and any novels. -- Kerry Greenwood
--
Because philosophy arises from awe, a philosopher is bound in his way to be a lover of myths and poetic fables. Poets and philosophers are alike in being big with wonder. -- Thomas Aquinas
The myths have always condemned those who 'looked back.' Condemned them, whatever the paradise may have been which they were leaving. Hence this shadow over each departure from your decision. -- Dag Hammarskjold
The logical man must either deny all miracles or none, and our American Indian myths and hero stories are perhaps, in themselves, quite as credible as those of the Hebrews of old. -- Charles Eastman
They do not depend upon mere legends and myths. They are not predicated on the false conception that the Emperor is divine and that the Japanese people are superior to other races. -- Emperor Hirohito
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. -- Alan Watts
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
I believe in everything until it's disproved. So I believe in fairies, the myths, dragons. It all exists, even if it's in your mind. Who's to say that dreams and nightmares aren't as real as the here and now? -- John Lennon
I do find the sibling connection endlessly fascinating, as I do all family dynamics. I like how siblings seem to create their own parentless mini-civilization within a family, one that has its own laws, myths, language, humor, its own loyalties and treacheries. -- Jandy Nelson
As I detail in my new book: 'Hard Measures, How Aggressive CIA Actions After 9/11 Saved American Lives,' there are many myths surrounding the detention of a relatively small number of top terrorists at CIA-run 'black sites' from 2002 until they were sent to Guantanamo Bay in 2006. -- Jose A. Rodriguez, Jr.
Both dreams and myths are important communications from ourselves to ourselves. If we do not understand the language in which they are written, we miss a great deal of what we know and tell ourselves in those hours when we are not busy manipulating the outside world. -- Erich Fromm
Fables should be taught as fables, myths as myths, and miracles as poetic fantasies. To teach superstitions as truths is a most terrible thing. The child mind accepts and believes them, and only through great pain and perhaps tragedy can he be in after years relieved of them. -- Hypatia
As popular culture becomes more presentist, we move away from entertainment as the vicarious experience of a narrative - as watching someone else's story - and much more toward enacting one's own story. Moving away from myths and toward fantasy role-playing games, away from movies and toward videogames. -- Douglas Rushkoff
Fallen myths can instill venom. -- Denis de Rougemont
We're separated by our myths. -- Hugh Hefner
I am attracted to myths. -- Tina Turner
All myths have a basis in fact -- Samaire Provost
Magic is at the core of myths. -- Colin Farrell
All systems require myths for their longevity. -- Nikki Giovanni
Our thinking is permeated by our historical myths -- Freeman Dyson
Like mold on books, grow myths on history. -- Laini Taylor
If swans weren't real, myths'd make them up. -- David Mitchell
Apparently, myths become truths if upheld long enough. -- Eric Chaisson
The myths die hard, especially within the Mafia. -- Robert D. McFadden
India has a long tradition of reinterpreting religious myths. -- Amish Tripathi
Mythology works... because Indians have been bred on myths. -- Ashwin Sanghi
Other people's beliefs may be myths, but not mine. -- Mason Cooley
I decided to write about the myths of divorce. -- Mary Garden
I loved the myths of ancient Greece and Egypt. -- Michelle Paver
I don't care what people's myths are about me. -- Kelly Lynch
We live in our myths, we only endure reality. -- Robert Anton Wilson
There are a lot of myths about gay people. -- Cynthia Nixon
Facing the kitsch aesthetic is the unfathomable world of myths. -- Saul Friedlander
Nights through dreams tell the myths forgotten by the day. -- Carl Jung
The writer's function is to prevent myths turning into allegories. -- Michel Tournier
Create your own myths; that is how the gods got started. -- Stanislaw Jerzy Lec
Both dreams and myths are important communications from ourselves to ourselves. -- Erich Fromm
Apart from myths and lies, what else is there but silence? -- Marty Rubin
The more real things get, the more like myths they become. -- Rainer Werner Fassbinder
The ancient Greeks have a knack of wrapping truths in myths. -- George Lloyd
Science must begin with myths, and with the criticism of myths. -- Karl Popper
There are more myths about Black Wednesday than the Greeks ever created. -- John Major
It's a good country for myths. Things seem to take root here. -- Diana Gabaldon
Every culture has their myths that people are aware of and share. -- Stellan Skarsgard
I love stories, I love myths, I love fairytales, I love Kafka. -- Regina Spektor
I have always found fact infinitely more interesting than myths and falsehoods. -- John Brunner
He who has no sympathy with myths has no sympathy with men -- Gilbert K. Chesterton
--
We must not be hampered by yesterday's myths in concentrating on today's needs. -- Harold S. Geneen
We must not be hampered by yesterday's myths in concentrating on today's needs. -- Harold S. Geneen
After all, I believe that legends and myths are largely made of 'truth'. -- J. R. R. Tolkien
History is often made and buttressed by myths and folklore rather than facts. -- Daikichi Irokawa
I wonder how they convince their conscience believing in myths and fallacious stories. -- M.F. Moonzajer
I'm drawn to characters who bear similarities to the protagonists in myths and legends. (...) -- Alan Lee
I've long said that comic books are the modern equivalent of our Greek myths. -- David S. Goyer
We cannot resort to simplistic or extreme solutions which substitute myths for common sense. -- Jimmy Carter
All great political families have myths: stories they tell themselves about how history happened. -- Peggy Noonan
The idea of "race" represents one of the most dangerous myths of our time. -- Ashley Montagu
If historians don't tell stories at the scales of creation myths, someone else will. -- David Christian
I truly appreciate the special qualities that America and American national myths offer me. -- Bharati Mukherjee
In myths things always turn into their opposites as one version supersedes the next. -- Samuel R. Delany
Historically speaking all - or very nearly all - scientific theories originate from myths. -- Karl Popper
True myths, ancient and modern, stop time because they emerge from somewhere beyond time. -- Phil Cousineau
Madonna, Michael Jackson, Tina Turner, Audrey Hepburn, Marilyn Monroe - they were myths of greatness. -- Rita Ora
What passes for identity in America is a series of myths about one's heroic ancestors. -- James A. Baldwin

Send