Myth Quotes - Page 16

• His life has been lived, so far, within narrow limits and he is quite naïve about most kinds of experience; he fears it and yet is wildly eager for it. To reassure himself, he converts it into epic myth as fast as it happens. He is forever play-acting.

  Christopher Isherwood

  Epic, Play, Forever

  Christopher Isherwood, Don Bachardy, James P. White (1989). “Where Joy Resides: An Isherwood Reader”, Vintage

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• [Kafka] transformed the profoundly antipoetic material of a highly bureaucratized society into the great poetry of the novel; he transformed a very ordinary story of a man who cannot obtain a promised job . . . into myth, into epic, into a kind of beauty never before seen.

  Milan Kundera

  Jobs, Epic, Men

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• The closeness of reality and the distance of myth, because if there is no distance you aren't amazed, and if there is no closeness you aren't moved.

  Peter Brook

  Distance, Reality, Amazed

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• A people that has remained convinced of its greatness and invulnerability, that has chosen to believe such a myth in the face of all the evidence, is a people in the grip of a kind of sleep, or madness.

  Salman Rushdie

  Believe, Sleep, Greatness

  "The Satanic Verses". Book by Salman Rushdie, September, 1988.

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• Universal education has created an immense class of what I may call the New Stupid, hungering for certainty yet unable to find it in the traditional myths and their rationalizations.

  Aldous Huxley

  Stupid, Class, May

  Aldous Huxley, Robert S. Baker, James Sexton (2000). “Complete Essays: 1920-1925”, Ivan R Dee

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• Never met such a Gorgon . . . I don't really know what a Gorgon is like, but I am quite sure that Lady Bracknell is one. In any case, she is a monster, without being a myth, which is rather unfair.

  Oscar Wilde

  Monsters, Unfair, Mets

  Oscar Wilde (2014). “The Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays”, p.26, Simon and Schuster

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• God was gone; it was the silence of his departure. It was a rainy night. It was the myth of the rainy night. Dean was popeyed with awe. This madness would lead nowhere. I didn't know what was happening to me, and I suddenly realized it was only the tea that we were smoking; Dean had bought some in New York. It made me think that everything was about to arrive - the moment when you know all and everything is decided forever.

  Jack Kerouac

  New York, Night, Thinking

  Jack Kerouac (2007). “Road Novels 1957-1960”

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• Canada is a myth people made up to entertain children, like the Tooth Fairy. There’s no such place.

  Christopher Moore

  Children, People, Teeth

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• If a man is offered a fact which goes against his instincts, he will scrutinize it closely, and unless the evidence is overwhelming, he will refuse to believe it. If, on the other hand, he is offered something which affords a reason for acting in accordance to his instincts, he will accept it even on the slightest evidence. The origin of myths is explained in this way.

  Bertrand Russell

  Truth, Believe, Men

  Bertrand Russell (2015). “Proposed Roads to Freedom”, p.109, Booklassic

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• Theologians in all the great faiths have devised all kinds of myths to show that this type of kenosis, of self-emptying, is found in the life of God itself. They do not do this because it sounds edifying, but because this is the way that human nature seems to work. We are most creative and sense other possibilities that transcend our ordinary experience when we leave ourselves behind.

  Karen Armstrong

  Self, Creative, Way

  Karen Armstrong (2010). “The Spiral Staircase”, p.313, Vintage Canada

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• Choose to believe in your own myth your own glamour your own spell a young woman who does this (even if she is just pretending) has everything.

  Francesca Lia Block

  Believe, Doe, Glamour

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• Only thought which does violence to itself is hard enough to shatter myth.

  Theodor Adorno

  Doe, Violence, Enough

  Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno (2002). “Dialectic of Enlightenment”, p.2, Stanford University Press

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• Yet we were rescued by that fancy, and saved by a myth.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Fancy, Saved

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• All myth is an enriched pattern, a two-faced proposition, allowing its operator to say one thing and mean another, to lead a double life. Hence the notion found early in ancient thought that all poets are liars. And from the true lies of poetry trickled out a question. What really connects words and things?

  Anne Carson

  Liars, Lying, Mean

  Anne Carson (2009). “The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos”, p.31, Vintage

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• How did you learn all this?" Vic sighed. "See, while you spend all your time making out with Balthazar, and Raquel stays holed up with her art projects, and Ranulf's off studying his Norse myths again, i do something else. Something crazy. Something strange. I call it 'talking to other people.' Through this miraculous process, I am sometimes able to learn facts about two or three other human beings in a single day. Scientists plan to study my method." ~Vic

  Claudia Gray

  Art, Crazy, Talking

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• Happiness is a myth. It was invented to make us buy new things.

  Gregory David Roberts

  Shantaram, New Things

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• We laughed about all the kids who believed in the Santa Clause myth and got nothing but a bunch of cheap plastic toys. 'Years from now, when all the junk they got is broken and long forgotten,' Dad said, ' you'll still have your stars.

  Jeannette Walls

  Stars, Dad, Kids

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• Having a place means that you know what a place means...what it means in a storied sense of myth, character and presence but also in an ecological sense...Integrating native consciousness with mythic consciousness

  Gary Snyder

  Character, Mean, Consciousness

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• The lesson here is very simple. But it is striking how often it is overlooked. We are so caught in the myths of the best and the brightest and the self-made that we think outliers spring naturally from the earth. We look at the young Bill Gates and marvel that our world allowed that thirteen-year-old to become a fabulously successful entrepreneur. But that's the wrong lesson. Our world only allowed one thirteen-year-old unlimited access to a time sharing terminal in 1968. If a million teenagers had been given the same opportunity, how many more Microsofts would we have today?

  Malcolm Gladwell

  Success, Teenager, Spring

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• When we die, as when the scenes have been fixed on to celluloid and the scenery is pulled down and burnt — we are phantoms in the memories of our descendants. Then we are ghosts, my dear, then we are myths. But still we are together. We are the past together, we are a distant past. Beneath the dome of the mysterious stars, I still hear your voice.

  Jostein Gaarder

  Stars, Memories, Past

  Jostein Gaarder (2010). “Maya”, p.158, Hachette UK

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• I've always thought of wholeness and integration as necessary myths. We're gragmented beings who cement ourselves together, but there are always cracks. Living with the cracks is part of being, well, reasonably healthy.

  Siri Hustvedt

  Healthy, Together, Cracks

  Siri Hustvedt (2008). “The Sorrows of an American: A Novel”, p.139, Macmillan

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• Do you know what religion is, Martin, my friend? -I can barely remember Lord's Prayer. -A beautiful and well-crafted prayer. Poetry aside, a religion is really a moral code that is expressed through legends,myths, or any type of literary device in order to establish a system of beliefs, values , and rules with which to regulate a culture or a society.

  Carlos Ruiz Zafon

  Beautiful, Prayer, Order

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• Many people entertain the idea that Christianity,like almost any other religion,is basically a system of beliefs-you know, a set of doctrines or a code of behavior, a philosophy, an ideology. But that's a myth. Christianity is not at all like Buddhism or Islam or Confucianism. The founders of those religions said (in effect), 'Here is what I teach. Believe my teachings. Follow my philosophy.' Jesus said, 'Follow me'(Matthew 9:9). Leaders of the world's religions said, 'What do you think about what I teach?' Jesus said, 'Who do you say I am?'(Luke 9:20)

  Josh McDowell

  Jesus, Philosophy, Believe

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• Myth must be kept alive. The people who can keep it alive are the artists of one kind or another.

  Joseph Campbell

  Inspirational, Art, People

  Joseph Campbell, Bill Moyers (2011). “The Power of Myth”, p.107, Anchor

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• The truth about an animal is far more exciting and altogether more beautiful than all the myths woven about it.

  Konrad Lorenz

  Beautiful, Animal, Woven

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