Myth Quotes - Page 2

• Myth is much more important and true than history. History is just journalism and you know how reliable that is.

  Joseph Campbell

  Inspirational, Truth, Important

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• The most important question anyone can ask is: What myth am I living?

  Carl Jung

  Important, Asks, Important Questions

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• Myths and legends die hard in America. We love them for the extra dimension they provide, the illusion of near-infinite possibility to erase the narrow confines of most men's reality. Weird heroes and mould-breaking champions exist as living proof to those who need it that the tyranny of 'the rat race' is not yet final.

  Hunter S. Thompson

  Love, Hero, Reality

  1969 'Those Daring Young Men In Their Flying Machines Ain't What They Used To Be!', in Pageant, Sep.

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• There is nothing truer than myth: history, in its attempt to realize myth, distorts it, stops halfway; when history claims to have succeeded, this is nothing but humbug and mystification. Everything we dream is realizable. Reality does not have to be: it is simply what it is.

  Eugene Ionesco

  Dream, Reality, History

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• For what are myths if not the imposing of order on phenomena that do not possess order in themselves? And all myths, however they differ from philosophical systems and scientific theories, share this with them, that they negate the principle of randomness in the world.

  Stanislaw Lem

  Philosophical, Order, Principles

  Stanislaw Lem (1996). “Highcastle: A Remembrance”, Mariner Books

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• The role of the artist I now understood as that of revealing through the world-surfaces the implicit forms of the soul, and the great agent to assist the artist was the myth.

  Joseph Campbell

  Inspirational, Artist, Soul

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• Man seeks to escape himself in myth, and does so by any means at his disposal. Drugs, alcohol, or lies. Unable to withdraw into himself, he disguises himself. Lies and inaccuracy give him a few moments of comfort.

  Jean Cocteau

  Lying, Mean, Men

  "On Invisibility". "Diary of an Unknown". Book by Jean Cocteau, 1953.

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• Weird heroes and mould-breaking champions exist as living proof to those who need it that the tyranny of 'the rat race' is not yet final.

  Hunter S. Thompson

  Hero, Race, Champion

  1969 'Those Daring Young Men In Their Flying Machines Ain't What They Used To Be!', in Pageant, Sep.

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• All the great things have been denied and we live in an intricacy of new and local mythologies, political, economic, poetic, which are asserted with an ever-enlarging incoherence.

  Wallace Stevens

  Political, Poetic, Economic

  Wallace Stevens (2011). “The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination”, p.17, Vintage

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• I drag my myth around with me.

  Orson Welles

  Deception, Drag

  Orson Welles, Peter Bogdanovich (1992). “This is Orson Welles”, HarperCollins Publishers

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• It is a sure sign that a culture has reached a dead end when it is no longer intrigued by its myths.

  Greil Marcus

  Culture, Dead Ends, Intrigued

  Greil Marcus (2015). “Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock 'n' Roll Music: Sixth Edition”, p.110, Penguin

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• No matter what a woman's appearance may be, it will be used to undermine what she is saying and taken to individualize - as her personal problem - observations she makes about the beauty myth in society.

  Naomi Wolf

  Taken, Independent Women, May

  Naomi Wolf (2013). “The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty are Used Against Women”, p.274, Random House

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• Mythology is much better stuff than history. It has form; logic; a message.

  Penelope Lively

  Messages, Stuff, Logic

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• Over the centuries we have transformed the ancient myths and folk tales and made them into the fabric of our lives. Consciously and unconsciously we weave the narratives of myth and folk tale into our daily existence.

  Jack Zipes

  Narrative, Fabric, Ancient

  Jack Zipes (2013). “Fairy Tale as Myth/Myth as Fairy Tale”, p.4, University Press of Kentucky

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• We need myths that will identify the individual not with his local group but with the planet.

  Joseph Campbell

  Groups, Needs, Individual

  Joseph Campbell, Bill Moyers (2011). “The Power of Myth”, p.30, Anchor

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• As naturally as the ruled always took the morality imposed upon them more seriously than did the rulers themselves, the deceived masses are today captivated by the myth of success even more than the successful are. Immovably, they insist on the very ideology which enslaves them. The misplaced love of the common people for the wrong which is done to them is a greater force than the cunning of the authorities.

  Theodor Adorno

  Successful, People, Done

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• The depth of your mythology is the extent of your effectiveness.

  John C. Maxwell

  Effectiveness, Growth, Depth

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• The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact. The old myth of the Dying God, without ceasing to be myth, comes down from the heaven of legend and imagination to the earth of history. It happens - at a particular date, in a particular place, followed by definable historical consequences. We pass from a Balder or an Osiris, dying nobody knows when or where, to a historical Person crucified (it is all in order) under Pontius Pilate. By becoming fact it does not cease to be myth: that is the miracle.

  C. S. Lewis

  Heart, Osiris, Order

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• One may as well preach a respectable mythology as anything else.

  Mary Augusta Ward

  May, Mythology, Wells

  "Bartlett's Familiar Quotations" by John Bartlett, 10th ed., 1919.

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• The poem is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful.

  Robert Penn Warren

  Meaningful, Men, Poetry

  1958 In the Saturday Review, 22 Mar.

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• Mental illness is a myth, whose function is to disguise and thus render more palatable the bitter pill of moral conflicts in human relations.

  Thomas Szasz

  Pills, Moral, Bitter

  Thomas Szasz (2017). “Words to the Wise: A Medical-Philosophical Dictionary”, p.156, Routledge

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• Freud becomes one of the dramatis personae, in fact, as discoverer of the great and beautiful modern myth of psychoanalysis. By myth, I mean a poetic, dramatic expression of a hidden truth; and in placing this emphasis, I do not intend to put into question the scientific validity of psychoanalysis.

  D. M. Thomas

  Beautiful, Truth, Mean

  1981 The White Hotel, author's note.

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• I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge.

  Robert Fulghum

  Hope, Laughter, Grief

  Robert Fulghum (2010). “It Was On Fire When I Lay Down On It”, p.8, Ivy Books

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• Sometimes legends make reality, and become more useful than the facts.

  Salman Rushdie

  Reality, Legends, Facts

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• A myth is a religion in which no one any longer believes.

  James Kern Feibleman

  Atheist, Believe, Cynical

  Understanding Philosophy ch. 3 (1973)

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