Mythology Quotes - Page 13

• I've always preferred mythology to history. History is truth that becomes an illusion. Mythology is an illusion that becomes reality.

  Jean Cocteau

  Reality, Illusion

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• Most people assume that a muse is a creature of perfect beauty, poise and grace. Like the creatures from Greek mythology. They're wrong. In fact, there should be a marked absence of perfection in a muse--a gaping hole between what she is and what she might be. The ideal muse is a woman whose rough edges and contradictions drive you to fill in the blanks of her character. She is the irritant to your creativity. A remarkable possibility, waiting to be formed.

  Kathleen Tessaro

  Creativity, Character, Rough Edges

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• The elephant which supports the world is called Muha-pudma, and the the tortoise which supports the elephant is called Chukwa. In some of the Eastern mythologies we are told that the world stands on the backs of eight elephants, called Achtequed-jams.

  E. Cobham Brewer

  Eight, Elephants, Support

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• The drug which makes sexuality palatable in popular mythology.

  Germaine Greer

  Love, Drug, Sexuality

  Germaine Greer (1972). “The female eunuch”

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• The mythology about the UN is absolutely breathtaking. People believe it costs a great deal of money to the United States. Completely untrue: it doesn't. The United States makes a net gain. People believe it's a world government, although the UN is a pathetically weak organization which improvises in emergencies to try to prevent the worst from happening.

  Brian Urquhart

  Money, Believe, World Government

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• One is almost tempted to say that the language itself is a mythology deprived of its vitality, a bloodless mythology so to speak, which has only preserved in a formal and abstract form what mythology contains in living and concrete form.

  Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling

  Vitality, Language, Speak

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• It seems obvious to me that the notion of God has never been anything but a kind of ideal projection, a reflection upward of the human personality, and that theology never has been and never can be anything but a more and more purified mythology.

  Alfred Loisy

  Reflection, Personality, Kind

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• Essentially, mythologies are enormous poems that are renditions of insights, giving some sense of the marvel, the miracle and wonder of life.

  Joseph Campbell

  Life, Giving, Miracle

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• Mythology is the womb of mankind's initiation to life and death.

  Joseph Campbell

  Life, Death, Men

  "Bios and Mythos".

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• We still like to make up stories, just as our ancestors did, which use personification to explain the great forces of our existence. Such stories, which explain how the world began or where the sun goes when it sets, we call myths. Mythology is a natural product of the symbolizing mind; poets, when not making up myths of their own, are still commanding ancient ones.

  John Frederick Nims

  Mind, Sun, Stories

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• Italian cameramen grow up immersed in an awareness of light. It is part of their mythology.

  Barbara Steele

  Growing Up, Italian, Light

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• I love Greek Mythology, wish there was a TV series, like being human or smallville, but with the series based around Percy Jackson and the Olympians, Holla Mayne!

  Rick Riordan

  Greek, Wish, Tvs

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• Science surpasses the old miracles of mythology.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Science, Miracle, Accounts

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Illustrated)”, p.2621, Delphi Classics

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• After chiding the theologian for his reliance on myth and miracle, science found itself in the unenviable position of having to create mythology of its own: namely, the assumption that what, after long effort, could not be proved to take place today had, in truth, taken place in the primeval past.

  Loren Eiseley

  Taken, Past, Origin Of Life

  Loren Eiseley (2011). “The Immense Journey: An Imaginative Naturalist Explores the Mysteries of Man and Nature”, p.199, Vintage

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• At the moment I am looking into astrology, which seems indispensable for a proper understanding of mythology. There are strange and wondrous things in these lands of darkness. Please, don't worry about my wanderings in these infinitudes. I shall return laden with rich booty for our knowledge of the human psyche.

  Carl Jung

  Land, Astrology, Worry

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• I discovered Los Angeles in the late 90s. The city was not at its best at the time, but I fell for it right away. There is something almost haunted about it, a vibrant mythology I find rather inspiring.

  Hedi Slimane

  Cities, Los Angeles, Late

  "Johnny Depp paints nails, Herman Cain ripped over moustache, Beastie Boys go bape, and Esquire gives 'damn good advice'" by Christina Moffitino and Elizabeth Snead, www.hollywoodreporter.com. November 10, 2011.

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• A culture without mythology is not really a civilisation.

  Vilayanur S. Ramachandran

  Culture, Civilisation

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• It is striking how history, when resting on the memory of men, always touches the bounds of mythology.

  Leopold von Ranke

  Memories, Men, History

  Leopold von Ranke (1840). “The ecclesiastical and political history of the popes of Rome during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries”

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• One must not believe any of those mythologies about oneself as an artist

  Anish Kapoor

  Believe, Artist, Oneself

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• The wedding is the chief ceremony of the middle-class mythology, and it functions as the official entrée of the spouses to their middle-class status. This is the real meaning of saving up to get married. The young couple struggles to set up an image of comfortable life which they will be forced to live up to in the years that follow.

  Germaine Greer

  Couple, Real, Struggle

  Germaine Greer (1972). “The female eunuch”

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• We can now say with considerable confidence that the Bible is not a history of anyone's past.... The Bible's "Israel" is a literary fiction... Not only have Adam and Eve and the flood story passed over to mythology, but we can no longer talk about a time of the patriarchs. There never was a "United Monarchy" in history and it is meaningless to speak of pre-exilic prophets and their writings... The Bible deals with the origin traditions of a people who never existed as such

  Thomas L. Thompson

  Bible, Writing, Past

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• History, mythology, and folktales are filled with stories of people punished for saying the truth. Only the Fool, exempt from society's rules, is allowed to speak with complete freedom.

  Jane Hirshfield

  Truth, People, Stories

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• On the much revered family of North American mythology - and a metaphor for the Ruling Alliance:
  Sacred family! .... The supposed home of all the virtues, where innocent children are tortured into their first falsehoods, where wills are broken by parental tyranny, and self-respect smothered by crowded, jostling egos.

  August Strindberg

  Children, Home, Self

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• But our ways of learning about the world are strongly influenced by the social preconceptions and biased modes of thinking that each scientist must apply to any problem. The stereotype of a fully rational and objective scientific method, with individual scientists as logical (and interchangeable) robots, is self-serving mythology.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Thinking, Self, Robots

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• I think there’s a mythology that if you want to change the world, you have to be sainted, like Mother Teresa or Nelson Mandela or Archbishop Desmond Tutu. Ordinary people with lives that go up and down and around in circles can still contribute to change.

  Jody Williams

  Mother, Thinking, Circles

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