Myth is a concept that has captivated human imagination throughout history. It refers to traditional stories or legends that explain natural phenomena, customs, or beliefs of a particular culture. Quotes about myth convey the profound significance and power that myths hold in shaping our understanding of the world. These quotes often highlight the enduring nature of myths and their ability to convey deep truths, universal themes, and timeless wisdom.
Myths which are believed in tend to become true. — George Orwell
For 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. — Thomas Mann
Myths are made for the imagination to breath life into them. — Albert Camus
A myth is a religion in which no one any longer believes. — James Feibleman
Myth is much more important and true than history. History is just journalism and you know how reliable that is. — Joseph Campbell
All the great legends are Templates for human behavior. I would define a myth as a story that has survived. — John Boorman
Myths are public dreams, dreams are private myths. — Joseph Campbell
The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie, deliberate, contrived and dishonest, but the myth, persistent, persuasive and unrealistic. — John F. Kennedy
There can be no stronger proof of the impoverishment of our contemporary culture than the popular - though profoundly mistaken - definition of myth as falsehood. — Rollo May
This is the power of myth: that we can experience invisible spiritual realities and truths greater than visible, material things in story form. — John Granger
I think of mythology as the homeland of the muses, the inspirers of art, the inspirers of poetry. To see life as a poem and yourself participating in a poem is what the myth does for you. — Joseph Campbell
In the absence of an effective general mythology, each of us has his private, unrecognized, rudimentary, yet secretly potent pantheon of dreams. — Joseph Campbell
Today's religion will be the future's mythology. Both believed at one time by many; but proved wrong by the clever. — Steve Crocker
Short Myth Quotes
The most dangerous leadership myth is that leaders are born. — Warren G. Bennis
The most important question anyone can ask is: What myth am I living? — Carl Jung
There is no sun without shadow, and it is essential to know the night. — Albert Camus
It's a bit of a myth that too much cholesterol causes heart attacks. — Steven Gundry
The whole westward expansion myth is seen as romantic. But its a joke, a blot on American history. — Frank Waters
The woman wins who calls herself beautiful, and challenges the world to change to fit her vision. — Naomi Wolf
There is scarcely any passion without struggle. — Albert Camus
At the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman. — Albert Camus
Seeking what is true is not seeking what is desirable. — Albert Camus
Women who love themselves are threatening; but men who love real women, more so. — Naomi Wolf
Myth Image Quotes
The Beauty Myth Quotes
No matter what a woman's appearance may be, it will be used to undermine what she is saying and taken to individualize - as her personal problem - observations she makes about the beauty myth in society. — Naomi Wolf
Isn’t this enough? Just this world? Just this beautiful, complex wonderfully unfathomable world? How does it so fail to hold our attention that we have to diminish it with the invention of cheap, man-made myths and monsters? — Tim Minchin
Culture stereotypes women to fit the myth by flattening the feminine into beauty-without-intelligence or intelligence-without-beauty; women are allowed a mind or a body but not both. — Naomi Wolf
Spokespeople sell women the Iron Maiden and name her "Health": if public discourse were really concerned with women's health, it would turn angrily upon this aspect of the beauty myth. — Naomi Wolf
There are truths, that are beyond us, transcendent truths, about beauty, truth, honor, etc. There are truths that man knows exist, but they cannot be seen - they are immaterial, but no less real, to us. It is only through the language of myth that we can speak of these truths. — J. R. R. Tolkien
A culture fixation on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty but an obsession about female obedience. Dieting is the most potent political sedative in women’s history; a quietly mad population is a tractable one. — Naomi Wolf
The beauty myth moves for men as a mirage; its power lies in its ever-receding nature. When the gap is closed, the lover embraces only his own disillusion. — Naomi Wolf
The beauty myth is always actually prescribing behaviour and not appearance. — Naomi Wolf
The myth of the strong black woman is the other side of the coin of the myth of the beautiful dumb blonde. — Eldridge Cleaver
As women demanded access to power, the power structure used the beauty myth materially to undermine women's advancement. — Naomi Wolf
God Is A Myth Quotes
Mother goddesses are just as silly a notion as father gods. If a revival of the myths of these cults gives woman emotional satisfaction, it does so at the price of obscuring the real conditions of life. This is why they were invented in the first place. — Angela Carter
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
Myths are public dreams, dreams are private myths. We must be willing to get rid of the life we planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us. I have bought this wonderful machine — a computer ... it seems to me to be an Old Testament god, with a lot of rules and no mercy. — Joseph Campbell
It is a myth that man in his natural state is genuinely seeking God. Men do seek God. But they do not seek him for who he is. They seek him in a pinch as one who might preserve them from death or enhance their worldly enjoyments. Apart from conversion, no one comes to the light of God. — John Piper
What is a god? A god is a personification of a motivating power of a value system that functions in human life and in the universe. — Joseph Campbell
The sun is our father, the earth is our mother. And God is a myth destroying our family. — Steve Fowler
The myth of this world is that the way to transformation is through power, but God choose to enter the world in a weak manner, gentle and tender through the heartbeat of a child. — Rick Dees
Evolution is a myth. God creates the future the way he wants it. — James Redfield
By asseting the creation myth, in which God is a man over ealier creation myths in which God was viewed as a woman, men hoped to prove that the position of supremacy that they had assumed was Divine Law. — Frederick Lenz
As a child I became a confirmed believer in the ancient gods simply because as between the reality of fact and the reality f myth, I chose myth...Myth is the truth of fact, not fact the truth of myth. — Kathleen Raine
Power Of Myth Quotes
You need music, I don't know why. It's probably one of those Joe Campbell questions, why we need ritual. We need magic, and bliss, and power, myth, and celebration and religion in our lives, and music is a good way to encapsulate a lot of it. — Jerry Garcia
Life has no meaning. Each of us has meaning and we bring it to life. It is a waste to be asking the question when you are the answer. — Joseph Campbell
According to Greek mythology, humans were originally created with four arms, four legs and a head with two faces. Fearing their power, Zeus split them into two separate parts, condemning them to spend their lives in search of their other halves. — Plato
Nothing is more powerful than a compelling story, especially in the framework of a revolution, which entails a struggle to create new symbols, new vocabularies, new ways of looking at the world, new identities, new myths. — Stephen Kotkin
The demon that you can swallow gives you it’s power, and the greater life’s pain, the greater life’s reply. — Joseph Campbell
If you follow your bliss...the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. — Joseph Campbell
For we have not even to risk the adventure alone, for the heros of all time have gone before us. — Joseph Campbell
Sit in a room and read--and read and read. And read the right books by the right people. Your mind is brought onto that level, and you have a nice, mild, slow-burning rapture all the time. — Joseph Campbell
You must have a room, or a certain hour or so a day, where you don't know what was in the newspapers that morning a place where you can simply experience and bring forth what you are and what you might be. — Joseph Campbell
Life is like arriving late for a movie, having to figure out what was going on without bothering everybody with a lot of questions, and then being unexpectedly called away before you find out how it ends. — Joseph Campbell
Beauty Myth Quotes
Man cannot do without beauty, and this is what our era pretends to want to disregard. — Albert Camus
To live in a culture in which women are routinely naked where men aren't is to learn inequality in little ways all day long. — Naomi Wolf
The moment there is imagination there is myth — Camille Paglia
The Victorian woman became her ovaries, as today's woman has become her "beauty. — Naomi Wolf
Beauty' is a currency system like the gold standard. — Naomi Wolf
I can see that the sadness has returned. And it's not a beautiful sadness- beautiful sadness is a myth. Sadness turns our features to clay, not porcelain. — David Levithan
I made art a philosophy, and philosophy an art: I altered the minds of men, and the colour of things: I awoke the imagination of my century so that it created myth and legend around me: I summed up all things in a phrase, all existence in an epigram: whatever I touched I made beautiful — Oscar Wilde
The idea that beauty is unimportant is the real beauty myth. — Nancy Etcoff
Freud becomes one of the dramatis personae, in fact, as discoverer of the great and beautiful modern myth of psychoanalysis. By myth, I mean a poetic, dramatic expression of a hidden truth; and in placing this emphasis, I do not intend to put into question the scientific validity of psychoanalysis. — D. M. Thomas
[Kafka] transformed the profoundly antipoetic material of a highly bureaucratized society into the great poetry of the novel; he transformed a very ordinary story of a man who cannot obtain a promised job . . . into myth, into epic, into a kind of beauty never before seen. — Milan Kundera
Myth Of Sisyphus Quotes
If the world were clear, art would not exist. — Albert Camus
Outside of that single fatality of death, everything, joy or happiness, is liberty. — Albert Camus
Like great works, deep feelings always mean more than they are conscious of saying. — Albert Camus
I don’t know whether this world has a meaning that transcends it. But I know that I cannot know that meaning and that it is impossible for me just now to know it. — Albert Camus
Happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth. They are inseparable. — Albert Camus
...Any authentic creation is a gift to the future. — Albert Camus
For if I try to seize this self of which I feel sure, if I try to define and to summarize it, it is nothing but water slipping through my fingers. — Albert Camus
To two men living the same number of years, the world always provides the same sum of experiences. It is up to us to be conscious of them. — Albert Camus
What is called a reason for living is also an excellent reason for dying. — Albert Camus
Greek Myth Quotes
As the ancient Greeks replaced myth-based explanations with mechanistic models of the Solar System, their emphasis shifted from asking why to asking how. — Max Tegmark
I'm obsessed with Greek mythology. My favorite goddess is Artemis. She's strong and reminds me of Katniss, the heroine of The Hunger Games. — Isabelle Fuhrman
Let us see how high we can fly before the sun melts the wax in our wings. — E. O. Wilson
II know a little about Greek mythology. It's not that far away from the Nordic mythology. — Sayings
...it seemed to me I was living in an insane asylum of my own making. I wnt 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. — Carl Jung
In Greek mythology, Antaeus was a giant who was strong as long as he had contact with the earth. When he was lifted from the earth he lost strength. So it is with engineers. They must not become isolated from the real world... — Hyman Rickover
Children are much more understanding of the suddenness and arbitrariness of death than we are. The old fairy tales contain a lot of that, and we've stolen from them, just as they stole from Greek myth, which has that same mixture of pre-Christian chaos. — Emma Thompson
Let the credulous and the vulgar continue to believe that all mental woes can be cured by a daily application of old Greek myths to their private parts. — Vladimir Nabokov
NFL Films has had one continuous, creative vision for 47 years. These are timeless things; timeless stories that we capture just like people go back and read Greek mythology. — Steve Sabol
I've long said that comic books are the modern equivalent of our Greek myths. — David S. Goyer
Love Is A Myth Quotes
There are places in this world where fable, myth, preconception, love, longing or prejudice step in and so distort a cool, clear appraisal that a kind of high colored magical confusion takes permanent hold...Surely Texas is such a place. — John Steinbeck
Eternal love is a myth, but we make our myths, and we love them to death. — Natalie Angier
Plays are just all sort of playful asides, and there's a great deal of reference here to Greek mythology, plays, and dramas. The idea of the chorus is really important in Greek drama and I loved the idea of including that. — Lauren Groff
I think in a lot of ways unconditional love is a myth. My mom's the only reason I know it's a real thing. — Conor Oberst
We are faced with the task of convincing a myth infatuated world that love and curiosity are sufficient and you don't have to delude yourself and frighten yourself with Iron Age fairy tales. This is a monumental task. I don't think there is an intellectual struggle more worthy of our efforts. — Sam Harris
Some tropes are universal. Boy meets girl. Betrayal and revenge. The search to discover a hidden truth.... A mother's love isn't cliché, it's universal. These things are archetypes. They're the building blocks of myth and legend. They are a big part about what it means to be human. — Patrick Rothfuss
The whole thing died in my mind long before the rumpus started. We used to believe the Beatles myth just as much as the public and we were in love with them just the same way. But we were four individuals who eventually recovered our individualities after being submerged in a myth. — John Lennon
In myths the warrant of grace was the acceptance of sacrifice; it is this acceptance that love, the re-enactment of sacrifice, beseeches if it is not to feel under a curse. — Theodor Adorno
The reality is that you are the spirit. The rest is a myth. — Nirmala Srivastava
Ego and conditionings are created by mind, which is a myth. — Nirmala Srivastava
Mythology Quotes
If you want to change the world, start with yourself. — Mahatma Gandhi
Being a hero doesn’t mean you’re invincible. It just means that you’re brave enough to stand up and do what’s needed. — Rick Riordan
All the great things have been denied and we live in an intricacy of new and local mythologies, political, economic, poetic, which are asserted with an ever-enlarging incoherence. — Wallace Stevens
A fiction about soft or easy deaths is part of the mythology of most diseases that are not considered shameful or demeaning. — Susan Sontag
We have doomed the wolf not for what it is, but for what we deliberately and mistakenly perceive it to be –the mythologized epitome of a savage ruthless killer – which is, in reality, no more than a reflected image of ourself. — Farley Mowat
If you take different mythologies from different cultures, the names may change and the story lines may vary but there is always something in common. — Maynard James Keenan
A group would rather keep living in the mythology of we were repressed than ever admit failure. — Naval Ravikant
You're basing your laws and your whole outlook on natural life on mythology. It won't work. That's why you have all these problems in the world. Name them: India, Pakistan, Ireland. Name them-all these problems. They're all religious problems. — Jack Kevorkian
I think the '60s were an extraordinary time. I feel bad for the kids today who missed this wonderful confluence, which was simultaneously a confluence of the global and the mythological. — Peter Coyote
When they first cast me, I was a pretty avid fan and vampire movies and Celtic mythology, so I was excited to get a chance to walk in Doyle's shoes and have fun with it. — Glenn Quinn
I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge. That myth is more potent than history. That dreams are more powerful than facts. That hope always triumphs over experience. That laughter is the only cure for grief. And I believe that love is stronger than death. — Robert Fulghum
I believe in everything until it's disproved. So I believe in fairies, the myths, dragons. It all exists, even if it's in your mind. Who's to say that dreams and nightmares aren't as real as the here and now? — John Lennon
We are still conditioning people in this country and, indeed, all over the globe to the myth of white superiority. We are constantly being told that we don't have racism in this country anymore, but most of the people who are saying that are white. White people think it isn't happening because it isn't happening to them. — Jane Elliott
People tend to think that in order to start a new business they have to come up with something new and dazzling, but that's a myth - and it's often propagated by venture capitalists. — Gurbaksh Chahal
We are not myths of the past, ruins in the jungle, or zoos. We are people and we want to be respected, not to be victims of intolerance and racism. — Rigoberta Menchu
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
Men, believing in myths, will always fear something terrible, everlasting punishment as certain or probable . . . Men base all these fears not on mature opinions, but on irrational fancies, that they are more disturbed by fear of the unknown than by facing facts. Peace of mind lies in being delivered from all these fears. — Epicurus
The great enemy of truth is very often not the lie--deliberate, contrived and dishonest--but the myth--persistent, persuasive and unrealistic. Too often we hold fast to the cliches of our forebears. We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought. — John F. Kennedy
My wireless transmitter does not use Hertzian waves, which are a grievous myth, but sound waves in the aether. — Nikola Tesla
I don't have to live up to that Superwoman myth. I can cry and be human and lean on people who take care of me. That can be very liberating. — Assata Shakur
They do not depend upon mere legends and myths. They are not predicated on the false conception that the Emperor is divine and that the Japanese people are superior to other races. — Hirohito
The most dangerous leadership myth is that leaders are born-that there is a genetic factor to leadership. This myth asserts that people simply either have certain charismatic qualities or not. That's nonsense; in fact, the opposite is true. Leaders are made rather than born. — Warren G. Bennis
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
The myth that women should lift light weights to prevent getting 'bulky' is perpetuated by men who fear women and women who fear work. — Layne Norton
Now, of course, the great thing about the solar system as a frontier is that there are no Indians, so you can have all the glory of the myth of the American westward expansion without any of the guilt. — Sarah Zettel
The robot misconception is related to the myth that machines can’t control humans. Intelligence enables control: humans control tigers not because we’re stronger, but because we’re smarter. This means that if we cede our position as smartest on our planet, it’s possible that we might also cede control. — Max Tegmark
Each religion, by the help of more or less myth, which it takes more or less seriously, proposes some method of fortifying the human soul and enabling it to make its peace with its destiny. — George Santayana
The existence of any pure race with special endowments is a myth, as is the belief that there are races all of whose members are foredoomed to eternal inferiority. — Franz Boas
Without an understanding of myth or religion, without an understanding of the relationship between destruction and creation, death and rebirth, the individual suffers the mysteries of life as meaningless mayhem alone. — Marion Woodman
Grow or Die is a core tenet at our companies. We believe every person, every company, and every organism is either growing or dying. Maintenance is a myth. — Alex Hormozi
The closeness of reality and the distance of myth, because if there is no distance you aren't amazed, and if there is no closeness you aren't moved. — Peter Brook
The myth of hell represents all the meanness, all the revenge, all the selfishness, all the cruelty, all the hatred, all the infamy of which the heart of man is capable. — Robert Green Ingersoll
Black racism is a myth created by whites to ease their guilt feelings. As long as whites can be assured that blacks are racists, they can find reasons to justify their own oppression of’ black people. — James H. Cone
We have deluded ourselves into believing the myth that capitalism grew and prospered out of the Protestant ethic of hard work and sacrifices. Capitalism was built on the exploitation of black slaves and continues to thrive on the exploitation of the poor, both black and white, both here and abroad. — Martin Luther King, Jr.
Rationalism belongs to the cool observer. But because of the stupidity of the average person, they follow not reason, but faith. This naïve faith, requires necessary illusions and emotionally potent oversimplifications, which are provided by the myth maker to keep the ordinary person on course. — Sayings
There are no gods, no devils, no angels, no heaven or hell. There is only our natural world. Religion is but myth and superstition that hardens hearts and enslaves minds. — Anne Nicol Gaylor
People with courage and character always seem sinister to the rest. It was a scandal that a breed of fearless and sinister people ran around freely, so they attached a nickname and a myth to these people to get even with them, to make up for the many times they had felt afraid. — Hermann Hesse
There is a myth, sometimes widespread, that a person need only do inner work...that a man is entirely responsible for his own problems; and that to cure himself, he need only change himself....The fact is, a person is so formed by his surroundings, that his state of harmony depends entirely on his harmony with his surroundings. — Christopher Alexander
Paleo is bullshit, fasted cardio isn't superior to fed cardio, keto isn't superior for fat burning, & fasting isn't anabolic. You're welcome. — Layne Norton
Social media has degenerated into a deafening cacophony of groups signaling and repeating their shared myths. — Naval Ravikant
In Conclusion
Quotes about myth often emphasize the role of storytelling in preserving and transmitting cultural knowledge. They acknowledge that myths are not merely fictional tales but rather narratives that contain essential truths about human existence. These quotes highlight how myths have the capacity to inspire, educate, and influence individuals and societies. They recognize the symbolic and metaphorical nature of myths, which allow them to resonate with people across different cultures and time periods. Quotes about myth invite us to appreciate the richness and diversity of human imagination and the enduring impact of mythical stories on our collective consciousness.
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Citation
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