Power Of Myth Quotes

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.

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.

But the myth of power is, of course, a very powerful myth, and probably most people in this world more or less believe in it. It is a myth, which, if everybody believes in it, becomes to that extent self-validating. But it is still epistemological lunacy and leads inevitably to various sorts of disaster.

This is the power of myth: that we can experience invisible spiritual realities and truths greater than visible, material things in story form.

The demon that you can swallow gives you it’s power, and the greater life’s pain, the greater life’s reply.

Myth is much more important and true than history.

History is just journalism and you know how reliable that is.

If you follow your bliss...the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living.

For we have not even to risk the adventure alone, for the heros of all time have gone before us.

Shakespeare said that art is a mirror held up to nature.

And that’s what it is. The nature is your nature, and all of these wonderful poetic images of mythology are referring to something in you. When your mind is trapped by the image out there so that you never make the reference to yourself, you have misread the image.

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.

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.

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.

When you have a World Champion in your smartphone, the myth of the superior brainpower of human chess champions has lost its power.

We're not on our journey to save the world but to save ourselves.

But in doing that you save the world. The influence of a vital person vitalizes.

The motive for criticizing myth, that is, its objectifying representations, is present in myth itself, insofar as its real intention to talk about a transcendent power to which both we and the world are subject is hampered and obscured by the objectifying character of its assertions.

Follow your bliss and don't be afraid, and door will open where you didn't know they were going to be.

There's nothing militant about Jesus.

I don't read anything like that in any of the gospels. Peter drew his sword and cut off the servant's ear, and Jesus said, "Put back thy sword, Peter." But Peter has had his sword out and at work ever since.

I only choose to write about people who are alive, are extremely powerful and as such have influenced our lives. I try to go behind their constructed myths to find the humanity of the person. It takes me about four years on every book and requires hundreds of interviews so I choose people whose lives I respect and achievements are worth recording.

I make my share of mistakes, but one I never make is to underestimate the power of things. People imbued from childhood with the myth of the primacy of feeling seldom like to admit they really want things as much as they might want love, but my career has convinced me that plenty of them do. And some want things a lot worse than they want love.

In times of violence, personal predilections for niceties of colour and form seem irrelevant. All primitive expression (like the myths) reveals the constant awareness of powerful forces, the immediate presence of terror and fear.

When your mind is simply trapped by the image out there so that you never make the reference to yourself, you have misread the image.

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

We often imagine that the court serves as a sort of neutral umpire controlling the warring political branches. But this is mostly myth. The justices of the Supreme Court are themselves actors in the struggle for power, and when they intervene, they think carefully about how their decisions will affect the courts own legitimacy and authority.

It is the doctrine of the oligarchy that there is nothing that we hold in common, that the commonwealth is a myth, that it is even a sign of softheadedness and weakness. The oligarchical power feeds on the sense that we are all individuals, struggling on our own, and ennobled by the effort.

The experience of Eternity right here and now, is the function of life.

We need myths that will identify the individual not with his local group but with the planet.

All religions are true but none are literal.

I always feel uncomfortable when people speak about ordinary mortals because I've never met an ordinary man, woman or child.

The grandest seduction of all is the myth that DOING EVERYTHING BETTER gets us where we want to be. It gets us somewhere, certainly, but not anywhere worth being

Whether you call someone a hero or a monster is all relative to where the focus of your consciousness may be.

Our life evokes our character and you find out more about yourself as you go on.

When you follow your bliss, you begin to meet people who are in the field of your bliss, and they open the doors to you.

I think it's important to live life with a knowledge of its mystery, and of your own mystery.

One of the myths propagated by the enemies of Israel is that there is an all-powerful Zionist conspiracy. That is a false accusation. Nevertheless, that AIPAC has been so successful in suppressing criticism has lent some credence to such false beliefs.