E Myth Quotes & Sayings

The myth of independence from the mother is abandoned in mid- life as women learn new routes around the mother
both the mother without and the mother within. A mid-life daughter may reengage with a mother or put new controls on care and set limits to love. But whatever she does, her child's history is never finished. — Terri E Apter

Moreover, an archetype exists in the nation's consciousness that connects student loan debt with irresponsibility. This is a result of well-publicized accounts of loan defaults in decades past in which students took out loans with no intention of ever paying them back and simply filed for bankruptcy after graduation. This perception was sufficiently strong that in the 1970s, Congress was convinced to remove bankruptcy protections from student loans. However, according to a March 2007 paper by John A. E. Pottow of the University of Michigan, this perception had a fatal flaw: "The fatal problem is that there are no empirical data to buttress the myth that students defraud creditors any more than other debtors."1 In fact, it was shown that when student loans were dischargeable in bankruptcy, there was a less than 1 percent bankruptcy rate among student debtors.2 Nevertheless, this misconception has been so often repeated that it is now indelibly etched in the public's mind. — Alan Collinge

I believe that global warming is a myth. And so, therefore, I have no conscience problems at all and I'm going to buy a Suburban next time. — Jerry Falwell

Scientists have long known that Darwinism is false. They have adhered to the myth out of self-interest and a zealous desire to put down God. — Phillip E. Johnson

I studied how to use the clothes washer. The handy instructions on the lid helped; so did the box of suds. It instructed me to separate the whites from the coloreds. Laundry will be the last American institution to desegregate. — Huston Piner

Christianity, rather than being one myth alongside many others, is thus the fulfilment of all previous mythological religions. Christianity tells a true story about humanity, which makes sense of all the stories that humanity tells about itself. — Alister E. McGrath

Now the story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened: and one must be content to accept it in the same way, remembering that it is God's myth where the others are men's myths: i.e., the Pagan stories are God expressing Himself through the minds of poets, using such images as He found there, while Christianity is God expressing Himself through what we call 'real things'. — C.S. Lewis

History often resembles myth, because they are both ultimately of the same stuff. — J.R.R. Tolkien

We all want to believe that we can do many things at once and that our attention is infinite, but this is a persistent myth. — Daniel J. Levitin

History is the present. That's why every generation writes it anew. But what most people think of as history is its end product, myth. — E.L. Doctorow

I have always considered imaginative truth to be more profound, more loaded with significance, than every day reality ... Everything we dream about, and by that I mean everything we desire, is true (the myth of Icarus came before aviation, and if Ader or Bleriot started flying it is because all men have dreamed of flight). There is nothing truer than myth ... Reality does not have to be: it is simply what is. — Eugene Ionesco

Alongside the mythos of the eternal free soul stands the Myth, the religion of the blood. — Alfred Rosenberg

When we place our immediate conflicts in the territory of an archetypal story we can better see the nature of our problems and find solutions that bring creative imagination to bear in the realm of hard facts and hardening dilemmas. — Michael Meade

If sunshine took human form, like some Greek myth, she would be Presley Shaw. — Emma Chase

It is the mistaken idea that if I reward mediocrity, I will curtail the person's aspirations to be better. That is a commonly held myth that keeps some parents from verbally affirming children. Of course, it's untrue. — Gary Chapman

A myth without a voice is like a dandelion without a breath of wind.
No way to spread the seeds. — V.E Schwab

For women especially, virginity has become the easy answer- the morality quick fix. You can be vapid, stupid, and unethical, but so long as you've never had sex, you're a "good" (i.e. "moral) girl and therefore worthy of praise. — Jessica Valenti

Alderic, Knight of the Order of the City and the Assault, hereditary Guardian of the King's Peace of Mind, a man not unremembered among the makers of myth, pondered so long upon the Gibbelins' hoard that by now he deemed it his. Alas that I should say of so perilous a venture, undertaken at dead of night by a valorous man, that its motive was sheer avarice! Yet upon avarice only the Gibbelins relied to keep their larders full, and once in every hundred years sent spies into the cities of men to see how avarice did, and always the spies returned again to the tower saying that all was well.
It may be thought that, as the years went on and men came by fearful ends on that tower's wall, fewer and fewer would come to the Gibbelins' table: but the Gibbelins found otherwise.
("The Hoard Of The Gibbelins") — Lord Dunsany

As long as there is still one beggar around, there will still be myth. — Walter Benjamin

Today the insatiable quest for profit promotes the new slavery. In bewildering ways, the new is more pernicious than the old, for the New American Slave is told he is free, and he clings to that myth as if his life depended upon it, a suspicion that cannot be totally ignored. — Gerry Spence

Privatization, of course, is based on yet another myth: that government-run programs must be inefficient, and privatization accordingly must be better. In fact, as we noted in chapter 6, the transaction costs of Social Security and Medicare are much, much lower than those of private-sector firms providing comparable services. This should not come as a surprise. The objective of the private sector is to make profits - for private companies, transactions costs are a good thing; the difference between what they take in and what they pay out is what they want to maximize.31 — Joseph E. Stiglitz

I am not a myth. — Marlene Dietrich

Christmas is not something that sprang from the musings of some person who creatively devised caricatures of elves, spiraling candy canes, visions of a magical city whose foundation was nestled in the far reaches of the North Pole, or embellishments of a kindly bishop spun by myth into a bearded old man in a red suit. — Craig D. Lounsbrough

The value of failure is greatly over-rated. It's a preposterous myth. — Peter Thiel

When in doubt, C4! — Jamie Hyneman

My feeling as a Christian points me to my Lord and Savior as a fighter. It points me to the man who once in loneliness, surrounded only by a few followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and summoned men to fight against them and who, God's truth! was greatest not as a sufferer but as a fighter. In boundless love as a Christian and as a man I read through the passage which tells us how the Lord at last rose in His might and seized the scourge to drive out of the Temple the brood of vipers and adders. How terrific was his fight against the Jewish poison. Today, after two thousand years, with deepest emotion I recognize more profoundly than ever before the fact that it was for this that He had to shed his blood upon the Cross. — Adolf Hitler

For Tolkien, a myth awakens in its readers a longing for something that lies beyond their grasp. Myths — Alister E. McGrath

Deniers build their pseudo-arguments on traditional anti-Semitic stereotypes and imagery. They contend that Jews created the myth of the Holocaust in order to bilk the Germans out of billions of dollars and ensure the establishment of Israel. Once again the devious Jews have harmed innocent multitudes - Germans and Palestinians in particular - for the sake of their own financial and political ends. To someone nurtured by the soil of anti-Semitism, this makes perfect sense.

-- The Eichmann Trial, page xx — Deborah E. Lipstadt

Your mother and I had one conversation a little before she died. She was sitting in the garden one evening when I came home from work, and she said, "I have to confess something. When we played 'chicken' from KDA to Clifton and I said I made you run three red lights, I lied. I made you stop even when they were only just turning amber." And I replied, "Samina, I didn't love you because you were the girl who ran red lights. I loved you because when you covered my eyes with your hands, I knew I could trust you to get me home." She was afraid of running red lights, Aasmaani. She wasn't an unbreakable creature of myth. She was entirely human, entirely breakable, and entirely extraordinary. — Kamila Shamsie

The evolutionary epic is ... the best myth we will ever have. — E. O. Wilson

A nation lives by its myths and heroes. Many societies have survived defeat and invasion, even political and economic collapse. None has survived the corruption of its picture of itself. High and popular art are not in competition here. Both may help citizens decide what they are and what they admire. In our age, however, high art has given up speaking to the body of its fellow citizens. It devotes itself to technical displays that can appeal only to other technicians. — E. Christian Kopff

Some people say that true love is a myth, that soulmates don't exist. I feel sadness for those cynical souls. They'll never know the high that comes from being with the one you're meant to be with. They'll never experience the absolute rightness of finding their true mate. — E.K. Blair

[P]rescientific people ... could never guess the nature of physical reality beyond the tiny sphere attainable by unaided common sense. Nothing else ever worked, no exercise from myth, revelation, art, trance, or any other conceivable means; and notwithstanding the emotional satisfaction it gives, mysticism, the strongest prescientific probe in the unknown, has yielded zero. — E. O. Wilson

One Archeology and Decipherment
Two History: Heroes, Kings, and Ensi's
Three Society: The Sumerian City
Four Religion: Theology, Rite, and Myth
Five Literature: The Sumerian Belles-Lettres
Six Education: The Sumerian School
Seven Character: Drives, Motives, and Values
Eight The Legacy of Sumer
APPENDIXES
A. The Origin and Development of the Cuneiform System of Writing
B. The Sumerian Language
C. Votive Inscriptions
D. Sample Date-Formulas
E. Sumerian King List
F. Letters
G. Dit lla's (court decisions)
H. Lipit-Ishtar Law Code
1. Farmers' Almanac
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY — Samuel Noah Kramer

For Tolkien, a myth is a story that conveys "fundamental things" - in other words, that tries to tell us about the deeper structure of things. The best myths, he argues, are not deliberately constructed falsehoods, but are rather tales woven by people to capture the echoes of deeper truths. Myths — Alister E. McGrath

Myths do not happen all at once.
They do not spring forth whole into the world. They form slowly, rolled between the hands of time until their edges smooth, until the saying of the story gives enough weight to the words - to the memories - to keep them rolling on their own.
But all stories start somewhere, and that night, as Rhy Maresh walked through the streets of London, a new myth was taking shape. — V.E Schwab

The typical Greek myth goes something like this: innocent shepherd boy is minding his own business, an overflying god spies him and gets a hard-on, swoops down and rapes him silly; while the victim is still staggering around in a daze, that god's wife or lover, in a jealous rage, turns him - the helpless, innocent victim, that is - into let's say an immortal turtle and e.g. power-staples him to a sheet of plywood with a dish of turtle food just out of his reach and leaves him out in the sun forever to be repeatedly disemboweled by army ants and stung by hornets or something. — Neal Stephenson

In the most important sense a creationist is a person who believes in creation, and that includes people who believe that Genesis is a myth and that creation involved a process called evolution and consumed billions of years. — Phillip E. Johnson

(a) Recent U.S. income growth primarily occurs at the top 1 percent of the income distribution. (b) As a result there is growing inequality. (c) And those at the bottom and in the middle are actually worse-off today than they were at the beginning of the century. (d) Inequalities in wealth are even greater than inequalities in income. (e) Inequalities are apparent not just in income but in a variety of other variables that reflect standards of living, such as insecurity and health. (f) Life is particularly harsh at the bottom - and the recession made it much worse. (g) There has been a hollowing out of the middle class. (h) There is little income mobility - the notion of America as a land of opportunity is a myth. (i) And America has more inequality than any other advanced industrialized country, it does less to correct these inequities, and inequality is growing more than in many other countries. — Joseph E. Stiglitz

It's not enough just to do those things anymore; what you must do instead if you want success on any large scale is either figure out a way of getting yourself associated in the audience's mind with their pieties and their sense of 'community,' i.e. ram it home that you're one of THEM; or, alternately, deck and bake yourself into an image configuration so blatant or outrageous that you become a culture myth. — Lester Bangs

Although I am a political liberal, I believe that conservatives have a better understanding of moral development (although not of moral psychology in general - they are too committed to the myth of pure evil). Conservatives want schools to teach lessons that will create a positive and uniquely American identity, including a heavy dose of American history and civics, using English as the only national language. Liberals are justifiably wary of jingoism, nationalism, and the focus on books by "dead white males," but I think everyone who cares about education should remember that the American motto of e pluribus, unum (from many, one) has two parts. The celebration of pluribus should be balanced by policies that strengthen the unum. — Jonathan Haidt

In other words, I would be giving in to a myth of sameness which I think can destroy us. — Audre Lorde

The belief that myths are somehow less true than the symbolic dream we call 'reality' may be the greatest myth of all. — Eric Micha'el Leventhal

More and more, I felt that I was meeting people like Lee who didn't at all seem part of this modern world and this moment in time - the world of petty aggravations and obligations and boundaries, a time of bored cynicism - because how they lived and what they lived for was so optimistic. They sincerely loved something, trusted in the perfectibility of some living thing, lived for a myth about themselves and the idea of adventure, were convinced that certain things were really worth dying for, believed that they could make their lives into whatever they dreamed. — Susan Orlean

Some things that should not have been forgotten were lost. History became legend. Legend became myth. — J.R.R. Tolkien

You ever hear about that experiment an American journalist did in Moscow in the 1970s? He just lined up at some building, nothing special about it, just a random door. Sure enough, someone got in line behind him, then a couple more, and before you knew it, they were backed up around the block. No one asked what the line was for. They just assumed it was worth it. I can't say if that story was true. Maybe it's an urban legend, or a cold war myth. Who knows? — Max Brooks

Ever since childhood, I've been interested in history and myth. Not just the facts and figures of the past, but everything that contributes to shape our perception of an age: architecture, art, literature and so forth. — Anne Fortier

Joseph Campbell understood critical doctrines of Christianity as myth and maintained that understanding myth was a key to making sense of key doctrines of Christianity in any society, including a highly-technological one. C. S. Lewis understood myth as one means among many used by God to point people to His Son, Jesus Christ. — James W Menzies

Art
the fresh feeling, new harmony, the transforming magic which by means of myth brings back the scattered distracted soul from its modern chaos
art, not politics, is the remedy. — Saul Bellow

The idea that guys should walk into a bar and confidently initiate contact and then seduce a woman based on a short term conversation is a toxic cultural myth that robs guys of self-confidence and that holds them up to an unrealistic standard that they have to become a super-extraverted narcissist in order to 'score with women' — Tucker Max

It's another myth that dancing distorts or destroys your feet. If you have the right shaped foot to start and a good, strong technique, your feet should be fine. — Deborah Bull

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

Jesse [James]was known as a kind of Robin Hood character and also it was known that his exploits were somewhat dubious - however, he perpetuated this myth. Our film [The Assassination of Jesse James ] really takes place at the end of all that, the last year of his life, at the end of all that celebrity. — Brad Pitt

The myth of integration as propounded under the banner of the liberal ideology must be cracked because it makes people believe that something is being achieved when in reality the artificially integrated circles are a soporfic to the blacks while salving the consciences of the few guilt-stricken whites. — Steven Biko

When western books are set in the present, critics seldom call them westerns: the national myth allows the West only a past. — Gerald W. Haslam

He is my unicorn, though ... That's how I felt falling in love with him, as if I'd found a creature of myth. — Rivka Galchen

Repetition, volume, and longevity will twist and turn a myth, a lie, into a commonly accepted way of doing things. — Dave Ramsey

The myth stems from the belief that writing is some mystical process. That it's magical. That it abides by its own set of rules different from all other forms of work, art, or play.But that's bullshit. Plumbers don't get plumber's block. Teachers don't get teacher's block. Soccer players don't get soccer block. What makes writing different? Nothing. The only difference is that writers feel they have a free pass to give up when writing is hard. — Patrick Rothfuss

Our thinking is permeated by our historical myths — Freeman Dyson

If you take myth and folklore, and these things that speak in symbols, they can be interpreted in so many ways that although the actual image is clear enough, the interpretation is infinitely blurred, a sort of enormous rainbow of every possible colour you could imagine. — Diana Wynne Jones

I thought: if I die, I hope I get reincarnated into a mosquito so I can bite that fucker kau-kau. — Zen Cho

...the whole of American life was organized around the cult of the powerful individual, that phantom ideal which Europe herself had only begun to outgrow in her last phase. Those Americans who wholly failed to realize this ideal, who remained at the bottom of the social ladder, either consoled themselves with hopes for the future, or stole symbolical satisfaction by identifying themselves with some popular star, or gloated upon their American citizenship, and applauded the arrogant foreign policy of their government. — Olaf Stapledon

In every such society, there is a cherished world of myth and metaphor which co-exists with the workaday world. Efforts to reconcile the two are made, and any rough edges at the joints tend to be off-limits and ignored. We compartmentalize. Some scientists do this too, effortlessly stepping between the skeptical world of science and the credulous world of religious belief without skipping a beat. Of course, the greater the mismatch between these two worlds, the more difficult it is to be comfortable, with untroubled conscience, with both. — Carl Sagan

It has served us well, this myth of Christ. — Pope Leo X

Combine two words, Myth and History. What do you get? Mystery. — Ashwin Sanghi

The myth of the impossible dream is more powerful than all the facts of history. — Robert Fulghum

Adrienne Mayor's inquiry into the myth
and surprising reality
of Amazon women begins with the fierce Greek huntress Atalanta, but takes us deep into the past and as far afield as the Great Wall of China. With the restless curiosity and meticulous scholarship that have become her hallmark, the author once again has found a gap in my bookshelf and filled it, admirably. — Steven Saylor

It seemed to me I was living in an insane asylum of my own making. I went about with all these fantastic figures: centaurs, nymphs, satyrs, gods and goddesses, as though they were patients and I was analyzing them. I read a Greek or Negro myth as if a lunatic were telling me his anamnesis. — C. G. Jung

We have come from God, and inevitably the myths woven by us, though they contain error, will also reflect a splintered fragment of the true light, the eternal truth that is with God. Indeed only by myth-making, only by becoming 'sub-creator' and inventing stories, can Man aspire to the state of perfection that he knew before the Fall. Our myths may be misguided, but they steer however shakily towards the true harbour, while materialistic 'progress' leads only to a yawning abyss and the Iron Crown of the power of evil. — J.R.R. Tolkien

I don't like the idea of drama schools. They only perpetuate the myth that everyone can do what I do — Zach Braff

The myth of the dead Indian goes back to the Protestant settlement of the U.S. The Pilgrims wanted to start a new life in America. They wanted to believe that in some sense they had come to a new Eden and that they could leave history behind in Europe. So they convinced themselves that this land had no history, that this was "virgin" land. This made the Indians' presence inconvenient. — Richard Rodriguez

If you made up a city like this, no one would have believed you. It seemed more like myth than reality- a whole metropolis built up around an industry that recorded dreams on giant screens, a city bordered by an ocean and a desert and snowcapped mountains. And right through the urban sprawl were canyons full of flowers, wild animals and secrets. — Francesca Lia Block

The thing I came for:
[ ... ]
the thing itself and not the myth — Adrienne Rich

Fighting for freedom" is a myth. There's only freedom in uniting. You're not really free with an, "Us vs Them" mentality; because you are constantly defending yourself. And in fighting, there's no time for freedom. — Jason Daniel Chaplin

In The Jaguar's Children we enter the dangerous borderlands between countries and generations; myth and magic; human community and the vast, infinitely mysterious, wild environment. Here, John Vaillant proves that his heart and imagination are as expansive and fierce as his radiant intellect. Never have I encountered a writer with more energy or compassion. — Melanie Rae Thon

Leroy's reasoning is dry as a razor, and Chantal agrees: love as an exaltation of two individuals, love as fidelity, passionate attachment to a single person - no, that doesn't exist. And if it does exist, it is only as self-punishment, willful blindness, escape into a monastery. She tells herself that even if it does exist, love ought not to exist, and the idea does not maker her bitter, on the contrary, it produces a bliss that spreads throughout her body. She thinks of the metaphor of the rose that moves through all men and tells herself that she has been living locked away by love and now she is ready to obey the myth of the rose and merge with its giddy fragrance. — Milan Kundera