Source: Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge (1963), Ch. 1 "Science : Conjectures and Refutations", Section VII
“Myth is at the beginning of literature, and also at its end.”
"Parable of Cervantes and Don Quixote" (January 1955)
Tr. Andrew Hurley, Collected Fictions (1998)
Dreamtigers (1960)
Variant: In the beginning of literature there is myth, as there is also in the end of it.
“The key is not to confuse myth and empirical results, or religion and science.”
Source: Dean of the Plasma Dissidents (1988), p. 196.
Context: Since religion intrinsically rejects empirical methods, there should never be any attempt to reconcile scientific theories with religion. An infinitely old universe, always evolving, may not be compatible with the Book of Genesis. However, religions such as Buddhism get along without having any explicit creation mythology and are in no way contradicted by a universe without a beginning or end. Creatio ex nihilo, even as religious doctrine, only dates to around AD 200. The key is not to confuse myth and empirical results, or religion and science.
Beyond the Last Thought: Freud's cigars and the long way round to Nirvana (p. 96)
The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths (2013)
“Wherever the poetry of myth is interpreted as biography, history, or science, it is killed.”
Source: The Hero With a Thousand Faces
The Spirit of Russia
I
1919
Thomas
Garrigue Masaryk
Paul
Eden
Paul
Cedar
208
Pedagogia do oprimido (Pedagogy of the Oppressed) (1968, English trans. 1970)
“Dream is personalized myth, myth is depersonalized dream; both myth and dream are symbolic”
Source: The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), Chapter 1
Context: Dream is personalized myth, myth is depersonalized dream; both myth and dream are symbolic in the same general way of the dynamics of the psyche. But in the dream the forms are quirked by the peculiar troubles of the dreamer, whereas in myth the problem and solutions shown are directly valid for all mankind.
“Myths are public dreams, dreams are private myths.”
“Better the myth of happiness, than the myth of despair.”
The Cornelius Quartet, The Condition of Muzak (1977)
Source: The Mirror; or, Harlequin Everywhere (p. 786)
“Science and technology revolutionize our lives, but memory, tradition and myth frame our response.”
