quotations about mythology
I'm always interested in debunking myths if they are untrue. But it's also important to identify myths and how they function, what value they may have.
NEAL ASCHERSON
interview, Scottish Review of Books
Myths are useful in forming not the total personality, but only the superego. The child knows that he cannot possibly live up to the hero's virtue, or parallel his deeds; all he can be expected to do is emulate the hero to some small degree; so the child is not defeated by the discrepancy between his ideal and his own smallness.
BRUNO BETTELHEIM
The Uses of Enchantment
That's how myths are born. Out of our carelessness, out of our tattered nerves, out of jokes that go wrong and flashy gestures.
SERGEI LUKYANENKO
Night Watch
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
I'll Be Watching You
We cannot resort to simplistic or extreme solutions which substitute myths for common sense.
JIMMY CARTER
State of the Union Address, Jan. 25, 1979
What a myth never contains is the critical power to separate its truths from its errors.
WALTER LIPPMANN
Public Opinion
Myth is at the beginning of literature, and also at its end.
JORGE LUIS BORGES
"Parable of Cervantes and Don Quixote,", Dreamtigers
There is something feeble and a little contemptible about a man who cannot face the perils of life without the help of comfortable myths. Almost inevitably some part of him is aware that they are myths and that he believes them only because they are comforting. But he dare not face this thought! Moreover, since he is aware, however dimly, that his opinions are not rational, he becomes furious when they are disputed.
BERTRAND RUSSELL
Human Society in Ethics and Politics
The myth is the foundation of life; it is the timeless schema, the pious formula into which life flows when it reproduces its traits out of the unconscious. Certainly when a writer has acquired the habit of regarding life as mythical and typical there comes a curious heightening of his artistic temper, a new refreshment to his perceiving and shaping powers, which otherwise occurs much later in life; for while in the life of the human race the mythical is an early and primitive stage, in the life of the individual it is a late and mature one.
THOMAS MANN
Freud and the Future
Myth is the nothing that is all.
FERNANDO PESSOA
"Ulisses"
We're separated by our myths.
HUGH HEFNER
Esquire, Jun. 2002