quotations about mythology
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.
HUNTER S. THOMPSON
Gonzo Papers
MYTHOLOGY, n. The body of a primitive people's beliefs concerning its origin, early history, heroes, deities and so forth, as distinguished from the true accounts which it invents later.
AMBROSE BIERCE
The Devil's Dictionary
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 with his instincts, he will accept it even on the slenderest evidence. The origin of myths is explained in this way.
BERTRAND RUSSELL
Proposed Roads to Freedom
I have often had the fancy that there is some one Myth for every man, which, if we but knew it, would make us understand all he did and thought.
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
Ideas of Good and Evil
When I became convinced that the universe is natural, that all the ghosts and gods are myths, there entered into my brain, into my soul, into every drop of my blood the sense, the feeling, the joy of freedom. The walls of my prison crumbled and fell. The dungeon was flooded with light and all the bolts and bars and manacles became dust.
ROBERT GREEN INGERSOLL
Why I Am An Agnostic
Only a few individuals succeed in throwing off mythology in a time of a certain intellectual supremacy--the mass never frees itself.
CARL JUNG
Psychology of the Unconscious
That which destroys the old mythos becomes the new mythos.
ROBERT M. PIRSIG
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Myths are lies; but I believe in the power of myths the way I believe in rocks ... rulers have had the various pantheons carrying water for them since the first con man met the first sucker, and priestcraft was born. That was long enough ago that they were probably both walking on their knuckles.
S. M. STIRLING
The Sunrise Lands
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.
ANNE CARSON
The Beauty of the Husband
True myth may serve for thousands of years as an inexhaustible source of intellectual speculation, religious joy, ethical inquiry, and artistic renewal. The real mystery is not destroyed by reason. The fake one is. You look at it and it vanishes. You look at the Blond Hero -- really look -- and he turns into a gerbil. But you look at Apollo, and he looks back at you. The poet Rilke looked at a statue of Apollo about fifty years ago, and Apollo spoke to him. "You must change your life," he said. When true myth rises into consciousness, that is always its message. You must change your life.
URSULA K. LE GUIN
"Myth and Archetype in Science Fiction", 1976
He who has no sympathy with myths has no sympathy with men
G. K. CHESTERTON
The Everlasting Man
The Value of myth is that it takes all the things you know and restores to them the rich significance which has been hidden by the veil of familiarity.
C. S. LEWIS
"Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings: A Review", On Stories and Other Essays on Literature
Our myths are rich with enchanters and enchantresses: sea nymphs that sing sailors onto rocks, Circe turning men into swine, pipers playing children to their doom. They are metaphors for the sinister secret urge to self-destruction that has been with us since the first bite of the first apple.
DEAN KOONTZ
Velocity
It is hard for many people to give up the religion in which they were born; to admit that their fathers were utterly mistaken, and that the sacred records of their country are but collections of myths and fables.
ROBERT GREEN INGERSOLL
Some Mistakes of Moses
There are those among us ... who prefer to live in myth instead of fact.
GLEN COOK, Doomstalker
But when he came to study those who had thrown off the old myths, he found them even more ugly than those who had not. They did not know that beauty lies in harmony, and that loveliness of life has no standard amidst an aimless cosmos save only its harmony with the dreams and the feelings which have gone before and blindly moulded our little spheres out of the rest of chaos.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
"The Silver Key"
Myths ... collected like barnacles on history, obscuring the truth.
BRIAN HERBERT & KEVIN J. ANDERSON
Dune: House Harkonnen
A myth or legend is simply not made up out of a vacuum. Nothing is--or can be. Somehow there is a kernel of truth behind it, however distorted that might be.
ISAAC ASIMOV
Foundation's Edge
Myth deprives the object of which it speaks of all history. In it, history evaporates.
ROLAND BARTHES
Mythologies
I took mythology a lot more seriously since I'd become a vampire.
STEPHENIE MEYER
Breaking Dawn