National Myths Quotes & Sayings

The mind is as big as the universe. — Helen Keller

How did I know how to do that to a body? Is that what you want to know?"
The boy, holding the tea tray, did not reply.
"I told you. It's exactly the same as cooking. I happen to know how to read."
"The library has stuff on things like that?"
The girl picked up the poker and pushed a maple log back into the fire. "The library has everything. — Laird Koenig

She has always been somehow weightless, free of the heavy burden of mother tongues, national histories, native soils, homelands, fatherlands, myths, that many of the people around her tote on their backs like a sack of red-hot stones. — Dasa Drndic

Antiquity breached mortality with myths.
Narcissus is vocabulary. Hermes decorates
A cornice on the Third National Bank. — Allen Tate

On the Ridgeway path, aged nine or ten, was where for the first time I realized the power a person might feel by aligning themselves to deep history. Only much later did I understand these intimations of history had their own, darker, history. The chalk country-cult rested on a presumption of organic connections to a landscape, a sense of belonging sanctified through an appeal to your own imagined lineage. That chalk downloads held their national, as well as natural, histories. And it was much later, too, that I realized that these myths hurt. That they work to wipe away other cultures, other histories, other ways of loving, working and being in a landscape. How they tiptoe towards darkness. — Helen Macdonald

I truly appreciate the special qualities that America and American national myths offer me. — Bharati Mukherjee

My dying planet needs to see what the body of Christ looks like. — Jon Foreman

Their faces shone with the delight of their souls. — Maya Angelou

Many countries in the Middle East are artificial creations. European colonialists drew their national borders in the nineteenth or twentieth century, often with little regard for local history and tradition, and their leaders have had to concoct outlandish myths in order to give citizens a sense of nationhood. Just the opposite is true of Iran. This is one of the world's oldest nations, heir to a tradition that reaches back thousands of years, to periods when great conquerors extended their rule across continents, poets and artists created works of exquisite beauty, and one of the world's most extraordinary religious traditions took root and flowered. — Stephen Kinzer

A prophet's task is to reveal the fault lines hidden beneath the comfortable surface of the worlds we invent for ourselves, the national myths as well as the little lies and delusions of control and security that get us through the day. And Jeremiah does this better than anyone. — Kathleen Norris

I just like doing things from my own head. — Andrea Arnold

Resistance is directly proportional to love. If you're feeling massive Resistance, the good news is that it means there's tremendous love there too. — Steven Pressfield

We need myths that will help us to identify with all our fellow-beings, not simply with those who belong to our ethnic, national or ideological tribe. We need myths that help us to realize the importance of compassion, which is not always regarded as sufficiently productive or efficient in our pragmatic, rational world. We need myths that help us to create a spiritual attitude, to see beyond our immediate requirements, and enable us to experience a transcendent value that challenges our solipsistic selfishness. We need myths that help us to venerate the earth as sacred once again, instead of merely using it as a 'resource.' This is crucial, because unless there is some kind of spiritual revolution that is able to keep abreast of our technological genius, we will not save our planet. — Karen Armstrong

This kind of nostalgia characterizes national and nationalist revivals all over the world, which engage in the antimodern myth-making of history by means of a return to national symbols and myths and, occasionally, through swapping conspiracy theories. Restorative nostalgia manifests itself in total reconstructions of monuments of the past, while reflective nostalgia lingers on ruins, the patina of time and history, in the dreams of another place and another time. — Svetlana Boym

These new people are, like us, a modern invention. But unlike us, their new name has no real meaning divorced from the machinery of criminal power. The new people were something else before they were white -- Catholic, Corsican, Welsh, Mennonite, Jewish -- and if all our national hopes have any fulfillment, then they will have to be something else again. Perhaps they will truly become American and create a nobler basis for their myths. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

Our national myths often exaggerate the role of the individual heroes and understate the importance of collective effort. — Robert D. Putnam

Democratic elections usually work only within populations that have some prior common bond, such as shared religious beliefs or national myths. They are a method to settle disagreements among people who already agree on the basics. — Yuval Noah Harari

God build's God's kingdom. But God ordered this world in such a way that His own work within that world takes place through the human beings that reflect His image. That is central to the notion of being made in God's image. He has enlisted us to act as His stewards in the project of creation. So the objection about us trying to build God's kingdom by our own efforts, though it seems humble and pious, can actually be a way of hiding from responsibility, of keeping one's head well down when the boss is looking for volunteers. — N. T. Wright

So, in "Melting Pot" the children (about a third of whom were kids of color) sang the line, "America was the new world and Europe was the old," in one stroke eradicating the narratives of indigenous persons for whom America was hardly new, and any nonwhite kids whose old worlds had been in Africa or Asia, not Europe. — Tim Wise

All these handsome guys are the same. When they're done combing their goddam hair, they beat it on you. — J.D. Salinger