I began composing the next poem, the one that was to be written next. Not the last poem of those I had read, but the poem written in the head of someone who may never...

Rites–of–passage stories…were cherished in pre–literate societies not only for their entertainment value, but also as mythic tools to prepare young men and women for life’s ordeals. A wealth of such stories can be found marking...

It is perilous to live past the end of your myth

Twelve mothers and twelve fathers were stacked into the long, thin house, each with four children, drawing the old cobalt-and-silver curtains down the center of rooms to make labyrinths of twelve dining rooms, twelve stting...

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?

It’s perfectly clear to me that religion is a myth. It’s something we have invented to explain the inexplicable. My religion and the spiritual side of my life come from a sense of connection to...

Real life is never quite as interesting as the story told afterward.

Thinking in mythological terms helps to put you in accord with the inevitables of this vale of tears. You learn to recognize the positive values in what appear to be the negative moments and aspects...

And the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva...

It felt relaxing to be someone else’s myth.

It has always been a mystery to me how Adam, Eve, and the serpent were taught the same language. Where did they get it? We know now, that it requires a great number of years...

Where are your stories?” said the other.”I cannot tell them. My head is a cloud.

A myth… is a metaphor for a mystery beyond human comprehension. It is a comparison that helps us understand, by analogy, some aspect of our mysterious selves. A myth, in this way of thinking, is...

In the specially Christian case we have to react against the heavy bias of fatigue. It is almost impossible to make the facts vivid, because the facts are familiar; and for fallen men it is...

The myth about me as a footballer has grown: I am now the lost Maradona of Norway.

This is the time of myths, Orphan. They are the cables that run under the floors and power the world, the conduits of unseen currents, the steam that powers the great engines of the earth.

Many people do simply awful things out of sincere religious belief, not using religion as a cover the way that Saddam Hussein may have done, but really because they believe that this is what God...

To idolise a person means you don’t get to know them, and the idea that you can become one is a myth, and it also means that you don’t need to talk to one another...

The place where the story happened was a world on the back of four elephants perched on the shell of a giant turtle. That’s the advantage of space. It’s big enough to hold practically anything,...

The value of the myth is that it takes all the things we know and restores to them the rich significance which has been hidden by ‘the veil of familiarity.’ The child enjoys his cold...

I argue that the Jesus of the Gospels is essentially a myth. The Gospels are largely fiction. They were created around the turn of the first and second century in order to give concreteness and...

Did the Abrahamic God know that, by “divinely inspiring” the book of Genesis and other tales in the Bible, that He would cause millions to impede scientific understandings of our origins and push for myth...

Each life is formed by its unique image, an image that is the essence of that life and calls it to a destiny. As the force of fate, this image acts as a personal daimon,...

The pattern glitters with cruelty. The blue beads are colored with fish blood, the reds with powdered heart. The beads collect in borders of mercy. The yellows are dyed with the ocher of silence. There...

[Northrop] Frye was concerned mostly with literary criticism, and myths interested him as structural elements in works of literature. He used the word myth to mean story, without attaching any connotation of truth or falsehood...

The man armed with knowledge has a better chance of survival than the man who is simply the fittest. Knowledge is the true strength. Muscle is where the myth is.

Why are so many of us enspelled by myths and folk stories in this modern age? Why do we continue to tell the same old tales, over and over again? I think it’s because these...

Once a poet calls his myth a myth, he prevents the reader from treating it as a reality; we use the word ‘myth’ only for stories we ourselves cannot believe.

Oh, man,’ Azdra’ik said. ‘This is what our eldest saw. This is what our legends say. Who could know, but us?

We are condemned to be modern. We can’t escape the facts of our history or of living in an age dominated by instrumental rationality, even as we look for ways out of it… But it...

It was a myth you couldn’t function on opiates: shooting up was one thing but for someone like me-jumping at pigeons beating from the sidewalk, afflicted with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder practically to the point...

A stubborn refusal of the conditions of 20th Century ‘reality’, surrealism has denied intransigently and consistently that modern man can live without a sense of wonder at the world that was once embodied in myth....

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...

Religion is like a blind man looking in a black room for a black cat that isn’t there, and finding it.

Elizabeth disliked the tragic, martyred image of Virginia Woolf which grew up after her death. When she read the first volume of William Plomer’s autobiography, At Home, in 1958, she told him that ‘only you...

No follower of Christ knew the shape of the earth. For many centuries this great Peasant of Palestine has been worshiped as God. Millions and millions have given their lives to his service. The wealth...

He is a unicorn. I want to gently capture him and bring him back to my lab for research.

Something that harms you cannot benefit you…Cigarette , Alcohol , Tobacco etc

. . . the mysteries, on belief in which theology would hang the destinies of mankind, are cunningly devised fables whose origin and growth are traceable to the age of Ignorance, the mother of credulity.

They spell-caught the sounds of cat paws, the breath of fish, the spittle of birds, the hairs of a woman’s beard, and the roots of a mountain, and spun them around the sinews of a...

The truth about an animal is far more exciting and altogether more beautiful than all the myths woven about it.

This is the time of myths. They are woven into the present like silk strands from the past, like a wire mesh from the future, creating an interlacing pattern, a grand design, a repeating motif....

There are those whose views about religion are not very different from my own, but who nevertheless feel that we should try to damp down the conflict, that we should compromise it. … I respect...

We hold this myth to be potentialNot self-evident but equationalAnother DimensionOf another kind of Living Life

Mythmaking is the evolutionary enterprise of translating truths.

The greatest and most blessed thing in the Germanic life is the mythical, sensitive, yet strong, awakening. The fact is that we have again begun to dream our own primal dreams.

Myth could be as sustaining as reality – sometimes even more so.

One of the misconceptions about atheism is that it somehow means someone denies the possibility of a deity. In all actuality, it simply means you don’t believe it to be the case — a point...

The only duty you owe is to yourself and to your family.The duty you owe to yourself is to do the best you can, and the duty you owe to your family is to endeavor...

Each of us lives with a sword over his head.There are those who can ignore its shadow and those who cannot. Those who cannot are not necessarily better than those who can. But they are...