Great Mythology Quotes & Sayings

I think we have a great deal of mythology around writing. We believe that only a few people can really do it. I wrote a book called 'The Right to Write.' In it, I argued that all of us have the capacity to write. That it's as normal to write as it is to speak. — Julia Cameron

I don't look at it as writing a book in a videogame universe. I look at it as writing for 'Halo', which for me, transcends being just a great video game. It's evolving into a whole new mythology. — Eric Nylund

The great mass of humankind possesses an unmistakable unit-identity. It can be one thing. It can act as a single organism. — Frank Herbert

No mortal ear could have heard the kelpie passing through the night, for the great black hooves of it were as soundless in their stride as feathers falling. — Mollie Hunter

Photography is there to construct the idea of us as a great family and we go on vacations and take these pictures and then we look at them later and we say, 'Isn't this a great family?' So photography is instrumental in creating family not only as a memento, a souvenir, but also a kind of mythology. — Larry Sultan

We do have some strong traditions of community in the United States, but it's interesting to me that our traditionally patriotic imagery in this country celebrates the individual, the solo flier, independence. We celebrate Independence Day; we don't celebrate We Desperately Rely on Others Day. Oh, I guess that's Mother's Day [laughter]. It does strike me that our great American mythology tends to celebrate separate achievement and separateness, when in fact nobody does anything alone. — Barbara Kingsolver

The man whirled, his hands still gripping the animal's skin, his face perfectly illuminated by the fire. He was half in shadow, and the shadow revealed him slowly. His left eye was covered by a black leather patch, and thin white scar raked his brow and the cheekbone below. The carried on, down the length of his neck, into the thick black beard, twisting under his collarbone and around his torso. They marred only the skin, I noted, for the muscles beneath were whole and strong, and the entire impression was one of great vitality and energy, strength unbridled. He looked nothing so much as a fallen god working at a trade.
"Hephaestus at the forge," I murmured, recalling my mythology ... — Deanna Raybourn

Science "works", of course, but from an aesthetic point of view, was it really a great improvement over mythology? Why do we insist that theories "work", when they might just as well sit around and look pretty?
I couldn't help observing that for every advance in science ... some perfectly competent goddess or demiurge is put out of work, a hypothesized spirit dies, or a living thing surrenders its autonomy. — Barbara Ehrenreich

As Mr. R. U. Sayee has well said: 'It should be clear a priori that fairy lore must have developed as a result of modifications and accretions received in different countries and at many periods, though we must not overlook the part played by tradition in providing a mould that to some extent determines the nature of later additions.' It must also be self-evident that a great deal of confusion has been caused by the assumption that some spirit-types were fairies which in a more definite sense are certainly not of elfin provenance. In some epochs, indeed, Faerie appears to have been regarded as a species of limbo to which all 'pagan' spirits - to say nothing of defeated gods, monsters, and demons - could be banished, along with the personnel of Olympus and the rout of witchcraft. Such types, however, are usually fairly easy of detection. — Lewis Spence

At the Foley Center for the Study of Lives at Northwestern University, McAdams studies the stories that people tell about themselves. We all write our life stories as if we were novelists, McAdams believes, with beginnings, conflicts, turning points, and endings. And the way we characterize our past setbacks profoundly influences how satisfied we are with our current lives. Unhappy people tend to see setbacks as contaminants that ruined an otherwise good thing ("I was never the same again after my wife left me"), while generative adults see them as blessings in disguise ("The divorce was the most painful thing that ever happened to me, but I'm so much happier with my new wife"). Those who live the most fully realized lives - giving back to their families, societies, and ultimately themselves - tend to find meaning in their obstacles. In a sense, McAdams has breathed new life into one of the great insights of Western mythology: that where we stumble is where our treasure lies. — Susan Cain

'O great and mighty Master Li, pray impart to me the Secret of Wisdom!' he bawled.
'Take a large bowl,' I said. 'Fill it with equal measures of fact, fantasy, history, mythology, science, superstition, logic, and lunacy. Darken the mixture with bitter tears, brighten it with howls of laughter, toss in three thousand years of civilization, bellow kan pei - which means "dry cup" - and drink to the dregs.'
Procopius stared at me. 'And I will be wise?' he asked.
'Better,' I said. 'You will be Chinese.' — Barry Hughart

As masculine self-consciousness grows stronger, the stage of matriarchy is followed by that of division. Symptomatic of this transition period is the twin-brother motif in mythology, which expresses the mutual affinity of opposites. This division turns destructively against itself in self-mutilation and suicide. As we saw, in uroboric and matriarchal castration the will of the Great Mother was paramount. But the centroversion tendency which underlies the ego-hero's struggle for self-preservation and which first takes the form of anxiety, advances beyond the passive, narcissistic stage and turns into resistance, defiance, and aggression directed against the Great Mother, as illustrated mythologically in the story of Hippolytus. — Erich Neumann

If we don't have a vigorous questioning, aggressive journalistic community and mythology, democracy itself is in great jeopardy. — Milton Glaser

Then on the River I saw the dream-built ship of the god Yoharneth-Lehai, whose great prow lifted grey into the air above the River of Silence. Her timbers were olden dreams dreamed long ago, and poets' fancies made her tall, straight masts, and her rigging was wrought out of the people's hopes. Upon her deck were rowers with dream-made oars, and the rowers were the people of men's fancies, and princes of old story and people who had died, and people who had never been. — Lord Dunsany

The return and reintegration with society, which is indispensable to the continuous circulation of spiritual energy into the world, and which, from the standpoint of the community, is the justification of the long retreat, the hero himself may find the most difficult requirement of all. For if he has won through, like the Buddha, to the profound repose of complete enlightenment, there is danger that the bliss of this experience may annihilate all recollection of, interest in, or hope for, the sorrows of the world; or else the problem of making known the way of illumination to people wrapped in economic problems may seem too great to solve. — Joseph Campbell

The great universal literature has always had a tragic relation with freedom. The Greeks renounced absolute freedom and imposed order on chaotic mythology, like a tyrant. — Ismail Kadare

Studios are so used to digital now, and there is a mythology that it's cheaper. But it's really not cheaper. For instance, digital is great for night exteriors; everybody knows it's a video tap, so it's very responsive to light. So you can go out at night, shoot with digital, and it's gorgeous, beautiful to look at. — Don Scardino

As every past generation has had to disenthrall itself from an inheritance of truisms and stereotypes, so in our own time we must move on from the reassuring repetition of stale phrases to a new, difficult, but essential confrontation with reality. For the great enemy of truth is very often not the lie-deliberate, contrived and dishonest-but the myth-persistent, persuasive and unrealistic. Mythology distracts us everywhere. — John F. Kennedy

When he woke up the next day, the world was still there, and things were already moving forward, like the great karmic wheel of Indian mythology that kills every living thing in its path. — Haruki Murakami

As the astronomer rejoices in new knowledge which compels him to give up the dignity of our globe as the centre, the pride, and even the final cause of the universe, so do those who have escaped from the Christian mythology enjoy their release from the superstition which fails to make them happy, fails to make them good, fails to make them wise, and has become as great an obstacle in the way of progress as the prior mythologies which it took the place of two thousand years ago. — Harriet Martineau

Then the woman in the bed sat up and looked about her with wild eyes; and the oldest of the old men said: 'Lady, we have come to write down the names of the immortals,' and at his words a look of great joy came into her face. Presently she, began to speak slowly, and yet eagerly, as though she knew she had but a little while to live, and, in English, with the accent of their own country; and she told them the secret names of the immortals of many lands, and of the colours, and odours, and weapons, and instruments of music and instruments of handicraft they held dearest; but most about the immortals of Ireland and of their love for the cauldron, and the whetstone, and the sword, and the spear, and the hills of the Shee, and the horns of the moon, and the Grey Wind, and the Yellow Wind, and the Black Wind, and the Red Wind. ("The Adoration of the Magi") — W.B.Yeats

The library was a great sprawling complex with rolls and rolls of paper tucked into many shelves. Between the reading rooms were courtyards with living fountains and singing birds and butterflies that would transform into handsome young women to guide or entertain anyone who stayed there any length of time. I saw one among the stacks, explaining an older style of calligraphy to the newly appointed Heavenly Marine Official of the South China Sea. In another wing, a librarian stepped from her chrysalis for the first time, reciting T'ang Dynasty poetry to the flowers. That's how I knew I was in the right section. — Larissa Lai

So many of the great detectives that we see on television now owe their origins to Sherlock Holmes. What was very exciting about Rob's pitch and script was that he is a real Holmes-ian expert. He knew all of the mythology. He was very well-versed in the genesis of Holmes and the stories. And the twist with Watson is something we jumped at immediately. It's a very forward-thinking way of doing the show. — Nina Tassler

It was only by escaping into the desert that Moses and the Jews were able to solidify their identity and reemerge as a social and political force.
Jesus spent his forty days in the wilderness, and Mohammed, too, fled Mecca at a time of great peril for a period of retreat. He and just a handful of his most devoted supporters used this period to deepen their bonds, to understand who they were and what they stood for, to let time work its good. Then this little band of believers reemerged to conquer Mecca and the Arabian Peninsula and later, after Mohammed's death, to defeat the Byzantines and the Persian empire, spreading Islam over vast territories. Around the world every mythology has a hero who retreats, even to Hades itself in the case of Odysseus, to find himself. — Robert Greene

Thus Arthur achieved the adventure of the sword that day and entered into his birthright of royalty. Wherefore, may God grant His Grace unto you all that ye too may likewise succeed in your undertakings. For any man may be a king in that life in which he is placed if so he may draw forth the sword of success from out of the iron of circumstance. Wherefore when your time of assay cometh, I do hope it may be with you as it was with Arthur that day, and that ye too may achieve success with entire satisfaction unto yourself and to your great glory and perfect happiness. — Howard Pyle

That's the great thing about rock n' roll: the myth is ultimately more important than the reality. And that's what you learn - you just learn to go with the mythology. — Billy Corgan

Many researchers do feel that humankind may have to face another Great Cleansing, such as the Great Flood of world mythology. Again, numerous UFO contactees and abductees feel that it is their mission to alert their fellow humans that some kind of apocalypse will soon be visited upon Earth. — Brad Steiger

What does our great historical hunger signify, our clutching about us of countless cultures, our consuming desire for knowledge, if not the loss of myth, of a mythic home, the mythic womb? — Friedrich Nietzsche

I've always been a mythology lover, and so I took a great deal of inspiration from the tales of various dark gods and popular versions of Hell from the Greeks and the Norse stories. — Michael Boatman

Children play at being great and wonderful people, at the ambitions they will put away for one reason or another before they grow into ordinary men and women. Mankind as a whole had a like dream once; everybody and nobody built up the dream bit by bit, and the ancient story-tellers are there to make us remember what mankind would have been like, had not fear and the failing will and the laws of nature tripped up its heels. The Fianna and their like are themselves so full of power, and they are set in a world so fluctuating and dream-like, that nothing can hold them from being all that the heart desires.
from a preface to
Gods and Fighting Men
by Lady Augusta Gregory — W.B.Yeats

We have looked for myths that include us in great novels, music, the latest comic book, or even some stupid advertising campaign. We'll look *anywhere* for a mythology that embraces people like ourselves. — Kate Bornstein

Mythologies, in other words, mythologies and religions are great poems and, when recognized as such, point infallibly through things and events to the ubiquity of a — Joseph Campbell

Some single trees, wholly bright scarlet, seen against others of their kind still freshly green, or against evergreens, are more memorable than whole groves will be by-and-by. How beautiful, when a whole tree is like one great scarlet fruit full of ripe juices, every leaf, from lowest limb to topmost spire, all aglow, especially if you look toward the sun! What more remarkable object can there be in the landscape? Visible for miles, too fair to be believed. If such a phenomenon occurred but once, it would be handed down by tradition to posterity, and get into the mythology at last. — Henry David Thoreau

I've always like Medieval literature. As a young girl I read mythologies and Norse legends, that sort of thing. I loved Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. While I was studying at Middle Tennessee State University for doctoral program I came in contact with more ancient literature. I examined older literature more seriously which intrigued and fascinated me very much; I was drawn to it.
For the book I used all my own translations of Beowulf from my doctorate. Culture is contained in language, if you study a language you'll see bits of culture, because the words are different and you see into the lives of the people. The Anglo-Saxon language touched me very deeply. Some of it is the heroic. Some of it is the melancholy. But there is also honor. You uphold, you fight to the death. Even if you watch movies, like Marvel comic book movies, like Thor: you want the great ones to win. Its even better if they have a fault. But you want the heroic character to win. — Deborah A. Higgens

Let's go for a walk, Mollie." Frank Spencer stiffened, but Mollie's annoying lawyer spoke in a calm voice. "They say that when a wolf wants to lead a sheep to slaughter, he'll try to cut her off from the herd where he can do his worst in private." There was snickering around the firelight as the entire herd moved in to protect the object of his affections. With the grinning faces of several men gloating at him, it would be impossible to sneak Mollie away. Zack turned to her with a pleasant smile on his face. "You know how in mythology the blind man is always the source of great wisdom and insight? Why couldn't you find one of those blind guys to be friends with?" Frank appeared flattered by the statement. He grinned as he warmed his hands before the brazier. — Elizabeth Camden

People want to establish a canon, because people want to imagine that there are great writers and lesser writers and they want the mythology, they want the narrative for themselves. And it's embarrassing. — Tim Parks

And thus when the great day arrived when the amphora was full with Poseidon's seed, the young Goddess was carried by Zeus' Great Eagle to Mount Ida from where she hurled the amphora into the sea. And it was reported by witnesses that when the amphora hit the water, thousands of Nymphs of all types were born & only three Cabiri & five Dactyls. For that was the power of Poseidon's seed. And this accounts for the fact that all the Sea Nymphs, other than the Nereids, were Poseidon's daughters, born of the creatures of the sea. — Nicholas Chong

Of all the great and minor faiths as religions that have evolved over the ages with humanity. Many had their birth at the death or near death of another religious faith. One day the anthropological phenomena of our predominant faiths may become naturally forgotten, demonized, if not
morph into another religious tradition altogether. What we historically call as mythology is for Ancient Greece,
Persia, or Mayan cultures were the Almighty religions of their age. So it will be again with our Epoch from today our renowned and accomplished heirs of thousands of years into
our combined futures. That will have regarded our present day Abrahamic traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam as mythologies of their own future anthropological understanding. — Ivan Alexander Pozo-Illas

Here was a small corner of the Greek archipelago; sky-blue, caressing waves, islands and rocks, a flowering strip of coastline, a magical panorama in the distance, an inviting sunset - you can't describe it in words. This is what the peoples of Europe remembered as their cradle; here unfolded the first scenes of mythology, here was their earthly paradise. Here lived beautiful people! They got up and went to sleep happy and innocent; the groves were filled with their joyous songs, their great excess of untapped energies went into love and artless joy. The sun bathed these islands and the sea in its rays, rejoicing in its beautiful children. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

She also stirred a sort of envy in him by telling him that during the Two Minutes Hate her great difficulty was to avoid bursting out laughing. But she only questioned the teachings of the Party when they in some way touched upon her own life. Often she was ready to accept the official mythology, simply because the difference between truth and falsehood did not seem important to her. — George Orwell

More history than ever is today being revised or invented by people who do not want the real past, but only a past that suits their purpose. Today is the great age of historical mythology. The defence of history by its professionals is today more urgent in politics than ever. We are needed. — Eric Hobsbawm

Like, a flood seems like a great way to punish every living creature in the world except for fish. What the hell is a god supposed to do when all the FISH start being assholes? — Cory O'Brien

Incidentally, am I alone in finding the expression "it turns out" to be incredibly useful? It allows you to make swift, succinct, and authoritative connections between otherwise randomly unconnected statements without the trouble of explaining what your source or authority actually is. It's great. It's hugely better than its predecessors "I read somewhere that ... " or the craven "they say that ... " because it suggests not only that whatever flimsy bit of urban mythology you are passing on is actually based on brand new, ground breaking research, but that it is research in which you yourself were intimately involved. But again, with no actual authority anywhere in sight. Anyway, where was I? — Douglas Adams

I found sometimes, that it is of great help in handling such a case, to encourage them, to express their peculiar contents either in the form of writing or of drawing and painting. There are so many incomprehensible intuitions in such cases, phantasy fragments that rise from the unconscious, for which there is almost no suitable language. I let my patients find their own symbolic expressions, their mythology. — C. G. Jung

I have always been interested in mythology and history. The more I read, the more I realized that there have always been people at the edges of history that we know very little about. I wanted to use them in a story and bring them back into the public's consciousness. Similarly with mythology: everyone knows some of the Greek or Roman legends, and maybe some of the Egyptian or Norse stories too, but what about the other great mythologies: the Celtic, Chinese, Native American? — Michael Scott

I think that in Sweden and a lot of European countries, there's this whole mythology of the wounded artist: that you can't really do any great art unless you're suffering. — Joel Kinnaman

Childhood is bound like the Gordian knot with my memories of the Black Sea, and I still feel its waters welling up within me today. Sometimes these waters are leaden, as grey as the military ships that sail on their curved expanses, and sometimes they are blue as pigmented cobalt. Then would come dusk, when I would sit and watch the seabirds waver to shore, flitting from open waters to the quiet empty vastlands in darkening spaces behind me, the same birds Ovid once saw during his exile, perhaps; and the same waters the Argonauts crossed searching for the fleece of renewal.

And out in the distance, invisible, the towering heights of Caucasus, where once-bright memories of the fire-thief have transmuted into something weird and many-faceted, and beyond these, pitch-black Karabakh in dolorous Armenia. — Paul Christensen

Could any State on Earth Immortall be,
Venice by Her rare Goverment is She;
Venice Great Neptunes Minion, still a Mayd,
Though by the warrlikst Potentats assayed;
Yet She retaines Her Virgin-waters pure,
Nor any Forren mixtures can endure;
Though, Syren-like on Shore and Sea, Her Face
Enchants all those whom once She doth embrace,
Nor is ther any can Her bewty prize
But he who hath beheld her with his Eyes:
Those following Leaves display, if well observed,
How she long Her Maydenhead preserved,
How for sound prudence She still bore the Bell;
Whence may be drawn this high-fetchd parallel,
Venus and Venice are Great Queens in their degree,
Venus is Queen of Love, Venice of Policie. — James Howell

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

If you look at the great Westerns, and at Greek, Roman, and Norse mythology, they all contain elements in common: a harsh landscape; demons or outlaws trying to stop or kill the protagonist; and there are mythical legends at their core, innate in all cultures. — Simon Toyne

We've never pulled from the toy line. We've always pulled from the mythology. What's great is there's so much mythology, so there's always stuff to pull from that. It never lines up perfectly for a movie; it's just like adapting a book or anything else, you know? But you come up with things to create, you come up with different ideas, but fundamentally the ideas always start from the mythology. — Lorenzo Di Bonaventura

This book is so huge, that the mythology took many months to create. There are literally hundreds of characters , and many different worlds described in great detail. It's not the sort of thing that you can simply dash off. I hand-write everything. Now, I've done three drafts on Imajica, which comes to about 14,000 pages. When you're working on a novel, you really must give your life over to the project. This is my eleventh book, and I'm fortunate to know that the audience is there for it. I'm not just writing in the dark. — Clive Barker

One great thing about growing old is that nothing is going to lead to anything. Everything is of the moment. — Joseph Campbell

A woman has her Juno, just as a man has his Genius; they are names for the sacred power, the divine spark we each of us have in us. My Juno can't "get into" me, it is already my deepest self. The poet was speaking of Juno as if it were a person, a woman, with likes and dislikes: a jealous woman.
The world is sacred, of course, it is full of gods, numina, great powers and presences. We give some of them names
Mars of the fields and the war, Vesta the fire, Ceres the grain, Mother Tellus the earth, the Penates of the storehouse. The rivers, the springs. And in the storm cloud and the light is the great power called the father god. But they aren't people. They don't love and hate, they aren't for or against. They accept the worship due them, which augments their power, through which we live. — Ursula K. Le Guin

I have a great interest in classical mythology and I need to make a sphinx or satyr every once in awhile to satisfy those interests. ( ... ) — Wendy Froud

In our national mythology, we seem to include only one-way migrations to the great capitol cities. The journey from the small Wisconsin town or Minnesota city to Chicago or New York or Los Angeles. Certainly for some people, that journey is a round trip. — Mona Simpson

Up until 1986, the top marginal rate, the top statutory rate was 50 percent. Now it's 35 percent. And all the pressure is on to lower that even further. And this just doesn't make a great deal of sense. When people say, 'Oh, we can't raise taxes on the rich. They'll go on strike, they'll move to another country.' But within recent memory, it hasn't been that long ago that we had rates that were substantially higher. And these people did just fine. I just think that there's a disconnect between the facts of what taxes do and the sort of mythology of what they do. — Bruce Bartlett

The spiritual man in mythology, in literature and in the great world religions has an excess of life, he knows he has it, makes no apology for it, and finally recognizes that he does not even need to protect or guard it. It is not for him. It is for others. His life is not his own. His life is not about him. It is about God. — Richard Rohr

In Greek mythology, the hero wants to be great, but the very concept does not exist in the Indian vocabulary. Yet it has become the global template. And it's a template that won't fit in India. — Devdutt Pattanaik

In order to get over the ethical difficulties presented by the naive naturalism of many parts of those Scriptures, in the divine authority of which he firmly believed, Philo borrowed from the Stoics (who had been in like straits in respect of Greek mythology), that great Excalibur which they had forged with infinite pains and skill - the method of allegorical interpretation. This mighty 'two-handed engine at the door' of the theologian is warranted to make a speedy end of any and every moral or intellectual difficulty, by showing that, taken allegorically or, as it is otherwise said, 'poetically' or, 'in a spiritual sense,' the plainest words mean whatever a pious interpreter desires they should mean. — Thomas Henry Huxley

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

People didn't realize it, but they needed myths to survive, just as much now as when their forebears were alive. Perhaps more. Mythology embodied the world's dreams, helped to make sense of the great human problems. Just as the dreams of individuals exist to give subconscious support to their conscious lives, so do myths serve as society's dreams. They uncover the dark, hidden places where mysteries dwell and can turn to nightmare if left untended. They make sense of injustice in archetypal terms. They give men and women a blueprint for how they may respond to success or failure, tragedy or joy. — Charles De Lint

The wine god sighed. 'Oh Hades if I know. But remember, boy, that a kind act can sometimes be as powerful as a sword. As a mortal, I was never a great fighter or athlete or poet. I only made wine. The people in my village laughed at me. They said I would never amount to anything. Look at me now. Sometimes small things can become very large indeed.' He left me alone to think about that. And as I watched Clarisse and Chris singing a stupid campfire song together, holding hands in the darkness, where they thought nobody could see them, I had to smile. — Rick Riordan

Even the greatest mathematicians, the ones that we would put into our mythology of great mathematicians, had to do a great deal of leg work in order to get to the solution in the end. — Daniel Tammet