Quotes about mythology (182 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

“It would seem that mythological worlds have been built up only to be shattered again, and that new worlds were built from the fragments.”

Franz Boas (1858–1942) German-American anthropologist

World

“Nosoi?” Percy planted his feet in a fighting stance. “You know, I keep thinking, I have now killed every single thing in Greek mythology. But the list never seems to end.”

“You haven’t killed me yet,” I noted.

“Don’t tempt me.”

Rick Riordan book The Hidden Oracle

Source: The Hidden Oracle

Thinking , Fight

“I am doubtful myself about the undertaking. Part of the attraction of the L. R. is, I think, due to the glimpses of a large history in the background: an attraction like that of viewing far off an unvisited island, or seeing the towers of a distant city gleaming in a sunlit mist. To go there is to destroy the magic, unless new unattainable vistas are again revealed. Also many of the older legends are purely 'mythological', and nearly all are grim and tragic: a long account of the disasters that destroyed the beauty of the Ancient World, from the darkening of Valinor to the Downfall of Númenor and the flight of Elendil.”

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (1892–1973) British philologist and author, creator of classic fantasy works

No. 247: To Colonel Worskett (20 September 1963)
The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien (1981)

World , Beauty , History , Thinking

“Doutbless, revenge is not always sweet, once it is consummated we feel inferior to our victim, or else we are tangled in the subtleties of remorse; so vengeance too has its venom, though it comes closer to what we are, to what we feel, to the very law of the self; it is also healthier than magnanimity. The Furies were held to antedate the gods, Zeus included. Vengeance before Divinity! This is the Major intuition of ancient mythology.”

Emil M. Cioran book History and Utopia

p. 70. https://books.google.com/books?id=5DuCDwAAQBAJ&pg=PT70
History and Utopia (1960)

God , Law , Revenge , Self-confidence

“If philosophy is still necessary, it is so only in the way it has been from time immemorial: as critique, as resistance to the expanding heteronomy, even if only as thought’s powerless attempt to remain its own master and to convict of untruth, by their own criteria, both a fabricated mythology and a conniving, resigned acquiescence. … It is incumbent upon philosophy … to provide a refuge for freedom. Not that there is any hope that it could break the political tendencies that are throttling freedom throughout the world both from within and without and whose violence permeates the very fabric of philosophical argumentation.”

Theodor W. Adorno (1903–1969) German sociologist, philosopher and musicologist known for his critical theory of society

Source: Wozu noch Philosophie? [Why still philosophy?] (1963), p. 10

World , Hope , Way , Freedom

“My objections to Marx are of two sorts: one, that he was muddle-headed; and the other, that his thinking was almost entirely inspired by hatred. The doctrine of surplus value, which is supposed to demonstrate the exploitation of wage-earners under capitalism, is arrived at: (a) by surreptitiously accepting Malthus's doctrine of population, which Marx and all his disciples explicitly repudiate; (b) by applying Ricardo's theory of value to wages, but not to the prices of manufactured articles. He is entirely satisfied with the result, not because it is in accordance with the facts or because it is logically coherent, but because it is calculated to rouse fury in wage-earners. Marx's doctrine that all historical events have been motivated by class conflicts is a rash and untrue extension to world history of certain features prominent in England and France a hundred years ago. His belief that there is a cosmic force called Dialectical Materialism which governs human history independently of human volitions, is mere mythology. His theoretical errors, however, would not have mattered so much but for the fact that, like Tertullian and Carlyle, his chief desire was to see his enemies punished, and he cared little what happened to his friends in the process.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

Source: 1950s, Portraits from Memory and Other Essays (1956), p. 211

World , Error , History , Motivation

“By the approach through abnormality we have succeeded in penetrating most deeply into the darkness of human nature … The literary person should be the last person to be surprised at this fact. Sooner might he be surprised that he, considering his strong generally and individual tendency, should have so late become aware of the close sympathetic relations which connected his own existence with psychoanalytic research and the life-work of Sigmund Freud. I realized this connection only at a time when his achievement was no longer thought of as merely a therapeutic method, whether recognized or disputed; when it had long since outgrown his purely medical implications and become a world movement which penetrated into every field of science and every domain of the intellect: literature, the history of art, religion and prehistory; mythology, folklore, pedagogy, and what not.”

Thomas Mann (1875–1955) German novelist, and 1929 Nobel Prize laureate

Freud and the Future (1937)

Life , World , Religion , Art

“My theological beliefs are likely to startle one who has imagined me as an orthodox adherent of the Anglican Church. My father was of that faith, and was married by its rites, yet, having been educated in my mother's distinctively Yankee family, I was early placed in the Baptist sunday school. There, however, I soon became exasperated by the literal Puritanical doctrines, and constantly shocked my preceptors by expressing scepticism of much that was taught me. It became evident that my young mind was not of a religious cast, for the much exhorted "simple faith" in miracles and the like came not to me. I was not long forced to attend the Sunday school, but read much in the Bible from sheer interest. The more I read the Scriptures, the more foreign they seemed to me. I was infinitely fonder on the Graeco-Roman mythology, and when I was eight astounded the family by declaring myself a Roman pagan. Religion struck me so vague a thing at best, that I could perceive no advantage of any one system over any other. I had really adopted a sort of Pantheism, with the Roman gods as personified attributes of deity.... My present opinions waver betwixt Pantheism and rationalism. I am a sort of agnostic, neither affirming nor denying anything.”

H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American author

Letter to Maurice W. Moe (16 January 1915), in Selected Letters I, 1911-1924 edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, p. 10
Non-Fiction, Letters

God , Education , School , Family

“If god is the root cause for our degradation destroy that god. If it is religion destroy it. If it is Manu Darma, Gita, or any other Mythology (Purana), burn them to ashes. If it is temple, tank, or festival, boycott them. Finally if it is our politics, come forward to declare it openly.”

Periyar E. V. Ramasamy (1879–1973) Tamil politician and social reformer

Veeramani, January 1981 (2005) Collected Works of Periyar E.V.R., Third Edition, Chennai. The Periyar Self-Respect Propaganda Institution, p. 489.
Society

God , Religion

“There is a sort of mythology that grows up about what happened, which is different from what really did happen.”

Peter Higgs (1929) British physicist

About the early days after the proposal of the Higgs mechanism, as quoted by Peter Rodgers, in Peter Higgs: the man behind the boson http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/print/19750, Physics World (July 10, 2004)

“The way that we behave contains way more information than we know. And part of the dream that surrounds our articulated knowledge has been extracted as a consequence of us watching each other behave, and telling stories about it over thousands and thousands and thousands of years, extracting out patterns of behavior that characterize humanity, and trying to represent them party through imitations but also through drama, mythology, and literature, and art, and all of that – to represent what we're like so we can understand what we're like. That process of understanding is what we see unfolding at least in part in the Biblical stories. It's halting and partial and awkward and contradictory and all of that, which is one of the things that makes it so complex, but I see in it the struggle of humanity to rise above its animal forebears and to become conscious of what it means to be human, and that's a very difficult thing.”

Jordan Peterson (1962) Canadian clinical psychologist, cultural critic, and professor of psychology

Other

Dreams , Art , Way , Behavior

“As for your artificial conception of "splendid & traditional ways of life"—I feel quite confident that you are very largely constructing a mythological idealisation of something which never truly existed; a conventional picture based on the perusal of books which followed certain hackneyed lines in the matter of incidents, sentiments, & situations, & which never had a close relationship to the actual societies they professed to depict... In some ways the life of certain earlier periods had marked advantages over life today, but there were compensating disadvantages which would make many hesitate about a choice. Some of the most literarily attractive ages had a coarseness, stridency, & squalor which we would find insupportable... Modern neurotics, lolling in stuffed easy chairs, merely make a myth of these old periods & use them as the nuclei of escapist daydreams whose substance resembles but little the stern actualities of yesterday. That is undoubtedly the case with me—only I'm fully aware of it. Except in certain selected circles, I would undoubtedly find my own 18th century insufferably coarse, orthodox, arrogant, narrow, & artificial. What I look back upon nostalgically is a dream-world which I invented at the age of four from picture books & the Georgian hill streets of Old Providence.... There is something artificial & hollow & unconvincing about self-conscious intellectual traditionalism—this being, of course, the only valid objection against it. The best sort of traditionalism is that easy-going eclectic sort which indulges in no frenzied pulmotor stunts, but courses naturally down from generation to generation; bequeathing such elements as really are sound, losing such as have lost value, & adding any which new conditions may make necessary.... In short, young man, I have no quarrel with the principle of traditionalism as such, but I have a decided quarrel with everything that is insincere, inappropriate, & disproportionate; for these qualities mean ugliness & weakness in the most offensive degree. I object to the feigning of artificial moods on the part of literary moderns who cannot even begin to enter into the life & feelings of the past which they claim to represent... If there were any reality or depth of feeling involved, the case would be different; but almost invariably the neotraditionalists are sequestered persons remote from any real contacts or experience with life... For any person today to fancy he can truly enter into the life & feeling of another period is really nothing but a confession of ignorance of the depth & nature of life in its full sense. This is the case with myself. I feel I am living in the 18th century, though my objective judgment knows better, & realises the vast difference from the real thing. The one redeeming thing about my ignorance of life & remoteness from reality is that I am fully conscious of it, hence (in the last few years) make allowances for it, & do not pretend to an impossible ability to enter into the actual feelings of this or any other age. The emotions of the past were derived from experiences, beliefs, customs, living conditions, historic backgrounds, horizons, &c. &c. so different from our own, that it is simply silly to fancy we can duplicate them, or enter warmly & subjectively into all phases of their aesthetic expression.”

H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American author

Letter to Frank Belknap Long (27 February 1931), in Selected Letters III, 1929-1931 edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, p. 307
Non-Fiction, Letters, to Frank Belknap Long

Life , Books , Age , World

“The only wealth you possess is your labour…France will become again what she should never have ceased to be—an essentially agricultural nation. Like the giant of mythology, she will recover all her strength by contact with the soil.”

Philippe Pétain (1856–1951) French military and political leader

Speech (August 1940), quoted in Pavlos Giannelia, 'France Returns to the Soil', Land and Freedom, Vol. XLI, No. 1, January-February 1941, p. 23 and Eugen Weber, 'France', in Hans Rogger and Eugen Weber (eds.), The European Right: A Historical Profile (University of California Press, 1966), p. 113.

Wealth

“I want the Brahmins to realize that the Dravidian people today are very much hating those who cunningly cheated them with absurdities. They are now aware of the particular community making a living by spreading the foolishness. People have begun to hate god, religion, caste, mythologies (puranas) and so on.”

Periyar E. V. Ramasamy (1879–1973) Tamil politician and social reformer

Veeramani, Collected Works of Periyar, p. 517.
Brahminism

God , Hate , People , Religion

“Cosmogony – the mythological understanding of the emergence of order. There's a chaos out of which order emerges.”

Jordan Peterson (1962) Canadian clinical psychologist, cultural critic, and professor of psychology

Other

Understanding

“DW is based on a slew of old myths, which reach their most 'refined' form in Hindu mythology, which in turn of course derived from the original Star Trek episode 'Planet of Wobbly Rocks where the Security Guard Got Shot.”

Terry Pratchett (1948–2015) English author

Usenet

Star

“Your wonderment 'what I have against religion' reminds me of your recent Vagrant essay… To my mind, that essay misses one point altogether. Your "agnostic" has neglected to mention the very crux of all agnosticism—namely that the Judaeo-Christian mythology is NOT TRUE. I can see that in your philosophy truth per se has so small a place, that you can scarcely realise what it is that Galpin and I are insisting upon. In your mind, MAN is the centre of everything, and his exact conformation to certain regulations of conduct HOWEVER EFFECTED, the only problem in the universe. Your world (if you will pardon my saying so) is contracted. All the mental vigour and erudition of the ages fail to disturb your complacent endorsement of empirical doctrines and purely pragmatical notions, because you voluntarily limit your horizon—excluding certain facts, and certain undeniable mental tendencies of mankind. In your eyes, man is torn between only two influences; the degrading instincts of the savage, and the temperate impulses of the philanthropist. To you, men have but two types of emotion—lovers of the self and lovers of the race…. You are forgetting a human impulse which, despite its restriction to a relatively small number of men, has all through history proved itself as real and as vital as hunger—as potent as thirst or greed. I need not say that I refer to that simplest yet most exalted attribute of our species—the acute, persistent, unquenchable craving TO KNOW. Do you realise that to many men it makes a vast and profound difference whether or not the things about them are as they appear?… If TRUTH amounts to nothing, then we must regard the phantasma of our slumbers just as seriously as the events of our daily lives…. I recognise a distinction between dream life and real life, between appearances and actualities. I confess to an over-powering desire to know whether I am asleep or awake—whether the environment and laws which affect me are external and permanent, or the transitory products of my own brain. I admit that I am very much interested in the relation I bear to the things about me—the time relation, the space relation, and the causative relation. I desire to know approximately what my life is in terms of history—human, terrestrial, solar, and cosmical; what my magnitude may be in terms of extension,—terrestrial, solar, and cosmical; and above all, what may be my manner of linkage to the general system—in what way, through what agency, and to what extent, the obvious guiding forces of creation act upon me and govern my existence. And if there be any less obvious forces, I desire to know them and their relation to me as well.”

H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American author

Letter to Maurice W. Moe (15 May 1918), in Selected Letters I, 1911-1924 edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, p. 60
Non-Fiction, Letters

Life , Men , Hunger , Truth

““What were they saying?” Daly asked.
“They disapprove of your profession,” Doro told him.
“Heathen savages,” Daly muttered. “They’re like animals. They’re all cannibals.”
“These aren’t,” Doro said, “though some of the their neighbors are.”
“All of them,” Daly insisted. “Just give them the chance.”
Doro smiled. “Well, no doubt the missionaries will reach them eventually and teach them to practice only symbolic cannibalism.”
Daly jumped. He considered himself a pious man in spite of his work. “You shouldn’t say such things,” he whispered. “Not even you are beyond the reach of God.”
“Spare me your mythology,” Doro said, “and your righteous indignation.” Daly had been Doro’s man too long to be pampered in such matters. “At least we cannibals are honest about what we do,” Doro continued. “We don’t pretend as your slavers do to be acting for the benefit of our victims’ souls. We don’t tell ourselves we’ve caught them to teach them civilized religion.””

Octavia E. Butler Wild Seed

Source: Wild Seed (1980), Chapter 3 (p. 42)

God , Religion , Smile , Soul

“It's not a bad idea to call this Cthulhuism & Yog-Sothothery of mine "The Mythology of Hastur"—although it was really from Machen & Dunsany & others, rather than through the Bierce-Chambers line, that I picked up my gradually developing hash of theogony—or daimonogony. Come to think of it, I guess I sling this stuff more as Chambers does than as Machen & Dunsany do—though I had written a good deal of it before I ever suspected that Chambers ever wrote a weird story!”

H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American author

Letter to August Derleth (16 May 1931), responding to Derleth's suggestion that he call the interconnected mythology of his stories (what would later be known as the Cthulhu Mythos) "The Mythology of Hastur", quoted in "H.P. Lovecraft, a Life" by S.T. Joshi, p. 505
Non-Fiction, Letters, to August Derleth

Idea , Thinking

“Without the support of your father (practically and metaphysically), without that behind you, without the knowledge of you as both a biological and cultural creature, with that depth of knowledge, you don't have the courage to do it, because you don't know what you are or what you could be. And so without that – because you're a historical creature, so you need all this collected wisdom, and all this dream-like information, and all this mythology and all this narrative, to inform you about what you are beyond what you see of yourself. And you're pummeled down, and people picked on you, and there's fifty things about you that are horrible, and you have a self-esteem problem, and you're sort of hunched over – you've got all these problems, and so it's not easy to see the divinity that lurks behind that. Unless you're aware of the heroic stories of the past – the metaphysics of consciousness – I don't think you can have the courage that regards yourself as the sort of creature that can stand up underneath that intense existential burden and move forward in courage and grace.”

Jordan Peterson (1962) Canadian clinical psychologist, cultural critic, and professor of psychology

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hdrLQ7DpiWs "Biblical Series II: Genesis 1: Chaos & Order"

Wisdom , People , Dreams , Courage

“An entire mythology is stored within our language.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) Austrian-British philosopher

Source: 1930s-1951, Philosophical Occasions 1912-1951 (1993), Ch. 7 : Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough, p. 133

“My first date has been sort of mythologized as ‘Bieber’s Dating Disaster.’ I took her to King’s a buffet restaurant. Yes, I wore a white shirt. Yes, I got spaghetti. No, this was not the brightest idea. But it wasn’t a big trauma, though.”

Justin Bieber (1994) Canadian singer-songwriter, record producer, and actor

From Justin's autobiography, First Step 2 Forever: My Story (2010), as quoted by VanityFair http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2010/10/in-honor-of-justin-biebers-new-autobiography-justin-bieber-first-step-2-forever-my-story-the-second-through-fifth-steps-2-forever, October 2010

Idea

“What chance has Vulcan against Roberts & Co., Jupiter against the lightning-rod and Hermes against the Credit Mobilier? All mythology overcomes and dominates and shapes the forces of nature in the imagination and by the imagination; it therefore vanishes with the advent of real mastery over them.”

Karl Marx (1818–1883) German philosopher, economist, sociologist, journalist and revolutionary socialist

Grundrisse (1857-1858)
Source: Introduction, p. 30.

Imagination , Nature , Chance

“I have often come across convinced adepts of Greek mythology who mock our faith under the pretext that we do not say anything else to those whom we instruct in divine things, but merely command them to believe.”

Theodoret (393–458) Syrian bishop

A Cure of Greek Maladies, Preface
In Theodoret of Cyrus (The Early Church Fathers), 2006, István Pásztori-Kupán, Routledge, p. 86 http://books.google.com/books?id=kRfnFbYsxekC&pg=PA86&dq=%22they+say+that+the+cult+of+martyrs+is+ridiculous%22&hl=en&ei=05LPTb3LDcLr0QGEo5CFDg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=2&ved=0CDAQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=%22they%20say%20that%20the%20cult%20of%20martyrs%20is%20ridiculous%22&f=false
Alternate translation: I have often encountered certain people still attached to the fables of pagan mythology who ridicule our belief and assert that faith is all we require of those whom we give religious instruction. They also point with scorn at the Apostles' lack of education and stigmatize these men as uncouth and ignorant of the niceties of cultivated speech. They further say that the veneration shown to the martyrs is absurd. And as for the living seeking to obtain the intercession of the dead, this, they declare, is the utmost folly.
In Patrology, Johannes Quasten, Volume 1, p. 543. http://books.google.com/books?id=j3fYAAAAMAAJ&q=%22as+for+the+living+seeking+to+obtain+the+intercession+of+the+dead%22&dq=%22as+for+the+living+seeking+to+obtain+the+intercession+of+the+dead%22&hl=en&ei=8jrSTbKcMYbi0QGJv7XfCw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=2&ved=0CC4Q6AEwAQ
Context: I have often come across convinced adepts of Greek mythology who mock our faith under the pretext that we do not say anything else to those whom we instruct in divine things, but merely command them to believe.
They accuse the apostles of ignorance, labelling them barbarians, because they do not have the subtlety of eloquence; and they say that the cult of martyrs is ridiculous, considering it completely absurd for the living to seek assistance from the dead.

Faith

“The passage of the mythological hero”

Joseph Campbell book The Hero with a Thousand Faces

Source: The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), Chapter 2
Context: The passage of the mythological hero may be overground, incidentally; fundamentally it is inward—into depths where obscure resistances are overcome, and long lost, forgotten powers are revivified, to be made available for the transfiguration of the world.... Something of the light that blazes invisible within the abysses of its normally opaque materiality breaks forth, with an increasing uproar. The dreadful mutilations are then seen as shadows, only, of an immanent, imperishable eternity; time yields to glory; and the world sings with the prodigious, angelic, but perhaps finally monotonous, siren music of the spheres. Like happy families, the myths and the worlds redeemed are all alike.

“I made my song a coat
Covered with embroideries
Out of old mythologies
From heel to throat”

W.B. Yeats (1865–1939) Irish poet and playwright

A Coat http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1393/
Responsibilities (1914)
Context: I made my song a coat
Covered with embroideries
Out of old mythologies
From heel to throat;
But the fools caught it,
Wore it in the world’s eyes
As though they’d wrought it.
Song, let them take it,
For there’s more enterprise
In walking naked.

“For anyone seeking meaning for his life a figure from Greek mythology comes to mind. It is that of Atlas, bearing with endless perseverance the weight of the heavens on his back.”

Hyman George Rickover (1900–1986) United States admiral

Atlas, resolutely bearing his burden and accepting his responsibility that gives us the example we seek. To seek out and accept responsibility; to persevere; to be committed to excellence; to be creative and courageous; to be unrelenting in the pursuit of intellectual development; to maintain high standards of ethics and morality; and to bring these basic principles of existence to bear through active participation in life — these are some of my ideas on the goals which must be met to achieve meaning and purpose in life.
And finally, the man who knows his purpose in life accepts praise humbly. He knows whatsoever talents we has were given him by the Lord and that these talents must be developed and used. In this way man renders thanks for the Lord's gift — and finds meaning in his life.
Thoughts on Man's Purpose in Life (1974)

Life , Perseverance

“The fact is, even in an Aryan society, which we do not have, one cannot and must not legislate morality. Morality must be inculcated in children by their parents and by the mythologies and subtle influence of constructive religion.”

David Lane (white nationalist) (1938–2007) American white supremacist, convicted felon

Drugs and Governments
Focus Fourteen

Religion , Children , Parent

“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 book Never Cry Wolf

Source: Never Cry Wolf

Reality , Wolf

“I've always preferred mythology to history. History is truth that becomes an illusion. Mythology is an illusion that becomes reality.”

Jean Cocteau (1889–1963) French poet, novelist, dramatist, designer, boxing manager and filmmaker

Truth , History , Reality

“Mythology may, in a real sense, be defined as other people's religion. And religion may, in a sense, be understood as popular misunderstanding of mythology. (8)”

Joseph Campbell (1904–1987) American mythologist, writer and lecturer

Source: Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor

People , Religion , Sense

“You deal with mythological stuff for a few years, you learn that paradises are usually places where you get killed.”

Rick Riordan book The Battle of the Labyrinth

Source: The Battle of the Labyrinth

Learning

“I think that nonexistent mythological creature just broke some of your toes," Jack said.
Oh, shut up," said Charles”

James A. Owen book Here, There Be Dragons

Source: Here, There Be Dragons

Thinking

“I love Greek Mythology, wish there was a TV series, like being human or smallville, but with the series based around Percy Jackson and the Olympians, Holla Mayne!”

Rick Riordan book The Battle of the Labyrinth

Source: The Battle of the Labyrinth

Love

“At first I was glad for the help. My freshmen English class, "Mythology and Archetypal Experience," confounded me.

I didn't understand why we couldn't just read books without forcing contorted interpretations on then”

Alison Bechdel (1960) American cartoonist, author

Source: Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

Books , Understanding , Reading , Help

“Lady, I was gonna cut you some slack, 'cause you're a major mythological figure… but now you've just gone nuts!”

Mike Mignola (1960) Comic creator

Source: Hellboy, Vol. 2: Wake the Devil

“As a means of expression, painting must deliver universally valid statements, make allegorical reflections on life, and create new mythologies.”

Stefan Szczesny (1951) German painter and sculptor

Mustique (2002)

Life , Universe , Painting

“In asking forgiveness of women for our mythologizing of their bodies, for being unreal about them, we can only appeal to their own sexuality, which is different but not basically different, perhaps, from our own. For women, too, there seems to be that tangle of supplication and possessiveness, that descent toward infantile undifferentiation, that omnipotent helplessness, that merger with the cosmic mother-warmth, that flushed pulse- quickened leap into overestimation, projection, general mix-up.”

John Updike (1932–2009) American novelist, poet, short story writer, art critic, and literary critic

“The Female Body,” Michigan Quarterly Review (1990)

Women , Forgiveness

“A small but significant number of angry and historically minded women comprehend the women's revolution in the visionary sense of an end to the catastrophic brotherhood and a return to the former glory and wise equanimity of the matriarchies. We don't know how this will take place exactly, nor the resultant nature of the new social forms, we know that it will take place, and in fact that the process of its development is now irreversibly underway. Of supreme importance in this process is the recovery by modern woman of her mythology as models for theory, consciousness, and action…. The Swiss patrician Jacob Bachofen was one of the first to discover "the female era at the lower seam of history, with its sacerdotal, political, and economic female dominion."”

Jill Johnston book Lesbian Nation

…. The fruits of this research were until recently unavailable except to a few initiates and they now form a cornerstone of the second wave in the feminist revolution....
Lesbian Nation (N.Y.: Simon & Schuster, 1973 (SBN (not ISBN) 671-21433-0)), pp. 248–249.

Women , History , Nature , Sense

“The development of Christianity in all the sects of the Western world during the past two centuries has been the progressive elimination from all of them of the elements of our natively Aryan morality that were superimposed on the doctrine before and during the Middle Ages to make it acceptable to our race and so a religion that could not be exported as a whole to other races. With the progressive weakening of our racial instincts, all the cults have been restored to conformity with the "primitive" Christianity of the holy book, i. e., to the undiluted poison of the Jewish originals. I should, perhaps, have made it more explicit in my little book that the effective power of the alien cult is by no means confined to sects that affirm a belief in supernatural beings. As I have stressed in other writings, when the Christian myths became unbelievable, they left in the minds of even intelligent and educated men a residue, the detritus of the rejected mythology, in the form of superstitions about "all mankind," "human rights," and similar figments of the imagination that had gained currency only on the assumption that they had been decreed by an omnipotent deity, so that in practical terms we must regard as basically Christian and religious such irrational cults as Communism and the tangle of fancies that is called "Liberalism" and is the most widely accepted faith among our people today.”

Revilo P. Oliver (1908–1994) American philologist

The Jewish Strategy, Chapter 12 "Christianity"
1990s, The Jewish Strategy (2001)

Men , People , Books , Age

“Mythology is studied in the school system because most of us come from it.”

Bel Kaufmanová book Up the Down Staircase

Part III, ch. 19 (unnamed student)
Up the Down Staircase (1965)

School , Study

“You and me on the bobbing knee.
Didn't we cry at that old mythology he'd read!
I will come home again, but not until
The sun and the moon meet on yon hill.”

Kate Bush (1958) British recording artist; singer, songwriter, musician and record producer

Song lyrics, The Kick Inside (1978)

Home , Reading , Sun , Cry

“This is our modern day mythology, this is American folklore and it's becoming international folklore. The ancient gods of Greece, Rome and Egypt still exist, except now they wear spandex and capes.”

Michael E. Uslan (1951) American film producer

Investing In Batman: 30 Years Later An Executive's Gamble On The Dark Knight Pays Off https://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanmac/2012/07/14/investing-in-batman-30-years-later-an-executives-gamble-on-the-dark-knight-pays-off/#4d778877ed82 (July 14, 2012)

God

“Artists don’t make objects. Artists make mythologies.”

Anish Kapoor (1954) British contemporary artist of Indian birth

Anish Kapoor Opens the Door:Modern Artist Creates Monuments that Transcend Space & Time

“Without proposing an evolutionary scheme for such types, it is safe to say that mythology represents the most archaic form of universe-maintenance, as indeed it represents the most archaic form of legitimation generally.”

Peter L. Berger book The Social Construction of Reality

1991; 127-8
The Social Construction of Reality, 1966

Universe

“Heresy is the life of a mythology, and orthodoxy is the death.”

Joseph Campbell (1904–1987) American mythologist, writer and lecturer

Lecture 1A, 20:42
Mythology and the Individual (1997)

Life , Death

“I… propose that time and its passage are fundamental and real and the hopes and beliefs about timeless truths and timeless realms are mythology.”

Lee Smolin (1955) American cosmologist

Time Reborn: From the Crisis in Physics to the Future of the Universe (2013)

Truth , Hope , Time

“The mythology of the New Testament, also, is not to be questioned with respect to the content of its objectifying representations but with respect to the understanding of existence that expresses itself in them.”

Rudolf Karl Bultmann (1884–1976) German theologian

Source: New Testament and Mythology and Other Basic Writings (1941), p. 10

Understanding , Question

“It is important to note that humans are a subset of apes, being members of the taxonomic superfamily Hominoidea. This is no arbitrary classification, but one that is objectively verifiable through phylogenetics. This is a fact that can be proven regardless what you would rather believe. Yet no religion either accounts for this fact nor even acknowledges it, as it stands against all their collective mythology.”

Aron Ra (1962) Aron Ra is an atheist activist and the host of the Ra-Men Podcast

Patheos, The Cow http://www.patheos.com/blogs/reasonadvocates/2016/01/22/the-cow/ (January 22, 2016)

Religion

“There has been a general trend in recent times toward a Unitarian mythology and the worship of one God. This is the tendency which it is customary to regard as spiritual progress. On what grounds? Chiefly, so far as one can see, because we in the Twentieth Century West are officially the worshippers of a single divinity. A movement whose consummation is Us must be progressive. Quod erat demonstrandum.”

Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) English writer

“One and Many,” p. 16
Do What You Will (1928)

God , Time

“Women are not in control of their bodies; nature is. Ancient mythology, with its sinister archetypes of vampire and Gorgon, is more accurate than feminism about the power and terror of female sexuality.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Vamps and Tramps (1994), "No Law in the Arena: A Pagan Theory of Sexuality", p. 30

Women , Nature

“You got overdraft at the mythology bank.”

Charles Stross book Singularity Sky

Source: Singularity Sky (2003), Chapter 15, “Delivery Service” (p. 329)

“Extinction confers on the has-been the same mythological status that imagination confers on the never-was.”

Michael Bishop book No Enemy But Time

Source: No Enemy But Time (1982), Chapter 18 “In a Season of Drought” (p. 158)

Imagination

“The all-inclusiveness of the RV in the realm of mythology is also observable in the sphere of poetics. There is hardly a major poetic device in the various IE branches that is not present in the RV. A significant aspect, for example, is that in early Greek poetry (epics of Homer and Hesiod, and some epigraphic material) the fairly strict syllabic meter (the hexameter with its dactylic, iambic and other variants) is preponderant with only traces of alliteration; in Germanic poetry alliteration prevails while the syllabic meter is very loose: both are present in the RV. …Early Irish poetry (6th century CE) has both meter and alliteration (and rhyme) but this hardly counts since the Irish poets knew these poetic devices “from Vergil and Ovid” and, of course, the Romans developed them from the Greek tradition. Of the Vedic poetic art Watkins writes: “The language of India from its earliest documentation in the Rigveda has raised the art of the phonetic figure to what many would consider its highest form.””

Nicholas Kazanas (1939)

"Indo-European Deities and the Rigveda," JIES 29 (2001), p. 257.

Art

“The Christianity of the first centuries recognized as productions of good art, only legends, lives of saints, sermons, prayers, and hymn-singing evoking love of Christ, emotion at his life, desire to follow his example, renunciation of worldly life, humility, and the love of others; all productions transmitting feelings of personal enjoyment they considered to be bad, and therefore rejected … This was so among the Christians of the first centuries who accepted Christ teachings, if not quite in its true form, at least not yet in the perverted, paganized form in which it was accepted subsequently.
But besides this Christianity, from the time of the wholesale conversion of whole nations by order of the authorities, as in the days of Constantine, Charlemagne and Vladimir, there appeared another, a Church Christianity, which was nearer to paganism than to Christ's teaching. And this Church Christianity … did not acknowledge the fundamental and essential positions of true Christianity — the direct relationship of each individual to the Father, the consequent brotherhood and equality of all people, and the substitution of humility and love in place of every kind of violence — but, on the contrary, having founded a heavenly hierarchy similar to the pagan mythology, and having introduced the worship of Christ, of the Virgin, of angels, of apostles, of saints, and of martyrs, but not only of these divinities themselves but of their images, it made blind faith in its ordinances an essential point of its teachings.
However foreign this teaching may have been to true Christianity, however degraded, not only in comparison with true Christianity, but even with the life-conception of the Romans such as Julian and others, it was for all that, to the barbarians who accepted it, a higher doctrine than their former adoration of gods, heroes, and good and bad spirits. And therefore this teaching was a religion to them, and on the basis of that religion the art of the time was assessed. And art transmitting pious adoration of the Virgin, Jesus, the saints, and the angels, a blind faith in and submission to the Church, fear of torments and hope of blessedness in a life beyond the grave, was considered good; all art opposed to this was considered bad.”

Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) Russian writer

What is Art? (1897)

Love , Life , God , People

“Subjective reason … is inclined to abandon the fight with religion by setting up two different brackets, one for science and philosophy, and one for institutionalized mythology, thus recognizing both of them. For the philosophy of objective reason there is no such way out. Since it hold to the concept of objective truth, it must take a positive or a negative stand with regard to the content of established religion.”

Max Horkheimer book Eclipse of Reason

Source: Eclipse of Reason (1947), p. 12.

Truth , Religion , Way , Science

“Every philosophical, ethical, and political idea—its lifeline connecting it with its historical origins having been severed—has a tendency to become the nucleus of a new mythology, and this is one of the reasons why the advance of enlightenment tends at certain points to revert to superstition and paranoia. The majority principle … has become the sovereign force to which thought must cater. It is a new god, not in the sense in which the heralds of the great revolutions conceived it, namely, as a power of resistance to existing injustice, but as a power of resistance to anything that does not conform.”

Max Horkheimer book Eclipse of Reason

Source: Eclipse of Reason (1947), p. 30.

God , Idea , Sense

“One may as well preach a respectable mythology as anything else.”

Mary Augusta Ward book Robert Elsmere

Robert Elsmere, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

“Modern physics has thus revealed that every subatomic particle not only performs an energy dance, but also is an energy dance; a pulsating process of creation and destruction. The dance of Shiva is the dancing universe, the ceaseless flow of energy going through an infinite variety of patterns that melt into one another’’. For the modern physicists, then Shiva’s dance is the dance of subatomic matter. As in Hindu mythology, it is a continual dance of creation and destruction involving the whole cosmos; the basis of all existence and of all natural phenomenon. Hundreds of years ago, Indian artists created visual images of dancing Shivas in a beautiful series of bronzes. In our times, physicists have used the most advanced technology to portray the patterns of the cosmic dance.”

Fritjof Capra book The Tao of Physics

Source: The Tao of Physics (1975), p. 244.

Beauty , Nature , Universe , Time

“It is impossible to repristinate a past world picture by sheer resolve, especially a mythical world picture, now that all of our thinking is irrevocably formed by science. A blind acceptance of New Testament mythology would be simply arbitrariness; to make such acceptance a demand of faith would be to reduce faith to a work.”

Rudolf Karl Bultmann (1884–1976) German theologian

Source: New Testament and Mythology and Other Basic Writings (1941), p. 3

World , Faith , Thinking , Science

“Man lives, not directly or nakedly in nature like the animals, but within a mythological universe, a body of assumptions and beliefs developed from his existential concerns.”

Northrop Frye (1912–1991) Canadian literary critic and literary theorist

Introduction, p. xviii
"Quotes", The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (1982)

Nature , Universe , Animals

“The landscape problem represents a serious problem in the development of science. Its solution requires… the construction of speculative cosmological scenarios, which posit regions or epochs of our universe for which we presently have no observable evidence. Nonetheless we must insist on taking seriously only scenarios and hypotheses that make falsifiable or strongly verifiable predictions, otherwise people can just make stuff up and the distinction between science and mythology becomes porous. …there are already candidate solutions that make real, falsifiable predictions.”

Lee Smolin (1955) American cosmologist

"A perspective on the landscape problem" arXiv (Feb 15, 2012)

People , Problem , Universe , Science

“If Darwin's discovery had been made in a Taoist or Shinto, Hindu or animist culture it would very likely have become just one more strand in its intertwining mythologies. In these faiths humans and other animals are kin. By contrast, arising among Christians who set humans beyond all other living things, it triggered a bitter controversy that rages on to this day.”

John Gray book Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

The Human: Science versus Humanism (p. 3-4)
Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (2002)

Faith , Rage , Animals

“Greek mythology tells us that the Gods invented woman as a punishment after man got a hold of some stolen goods. Obviously, this was just the mythological explanation given by the primitive early men to explain the real origin of women, which was this: THEY CAME DOWN IN SPACESHIPS. Yes, all women are space aliens who have come from a far-off galaxy to enslave mankind.”

Ben Croshaw (1983) English video game journalist

Ask Yahtzee
Fully Ramblomatic, Features

Women , Men , God

“India though it has more than five hundred spoken dialects, has only one sacred language and only one sacred literature, accepted and revered by all adherence of Hinduism alike, however diverse in race, dialect, rank and creed. That language is Sanskrit and Sanskrit literature, the only repository of the Veda or knowledge in its widest sense, the only vehicle of Hindu mythology, philosophy, law, the mirror in which all the creeds, opinions, and customs and usages of the Hindus are faithfully reflected and the only quarry whence the requisite materials may be obtained for improving the vernaculars or for expressing important religious and scientific ideas.”

Monier Monier-Williams (1819–1899) Linguist and dictionary compiler

Sir Monier Monier-Williams in: The Literary World: Choice Readings from the Best New Books, with Critical Revisions https://books.google.co.in/books?id=qOoRAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA252, James Clarke & Company, 1877, p. 252.

Law , Literature , Idea , Knowledge

“And that's not socialist mythology, This is urban warfare, to the streets of your psychology.”

Immortal Technique (1978) American rapper and activist

Death March
Albums, The 3rd World (2008)

“There are certain things that are just impressive, aren’t there? One stone can be impressive and the stones around it aren’t. It’s the same with animals. Some, for some reason, are strangely impressive. They just get into you in a strange way. Certain birds obviously have this extra quality that fascinates your attention. Obviously hawks have always done that for me, as a great many others have — not only impressive in themselves but also in that they’ve accumulated an enormous literature making them even more impressive. And crows too. Crows are the central bird in many mythologies. The crow is at every extreme, lives on every piece of land on earth, the most intelligent bird.”

Ted Hughes (1930–1998) English poet and children's writer

The Paris Review interview

Way , Intelligence , Literature , Bird

“These ideas are present in all sorts of unrelated cultures -- the Easter Islands, Celtic mythology, Plato's Symposium with its notion that we are all originally hermaphrodite. We became too arrogant and so the gods split us down the middle, forcing us to spend our lives chasing our other half. If we start being arrogant all over again, God will come down and split each half in half, and it will take four people to assemble a fifth, making our lives peculiarly, desperately difficult.”

Peter Greenaway (1942) British film director

In an interview in the Washington DC City Paper, 6 Apr 1990
Interviews

God , People , Idea

“Though Govind Singh is considered as the founder of the Khalsa order (1699) who 'gave his Sikhs an outward form distinct from the Hindus', he too did things which Sikh separatists would dismiss as 'brahminical'. As Khushwant Singh notes, 'Gobind selected five of the most scholarly of his disciples and sent them to Benares to learn Sanskrit and the Hindu religious texts, to be better able to interpret the writings of the gurus, which were full of allusions to Hindu mythology and philosophy.”

Guru Govind Singh (1666–1708) The tenth and last human Guru of Sikhism

Khushwant Singh, K. Elst, quoted in Elst, Koenraad (2002). Who is a Hindu?: Hindu revivalist views of Animism, Buddhism, Sikhism, and other offshoots of Hinduism. ISBN 978-8185990743

Learning

“.. my own paintings of that period (1916 – 1919) remain pure still-life compositions and never suggest any metaphysical, surrealist, psychological, or literary considerations at all [reacting on similarities with the art of Carrà, and de Chirico, suggested by the interviewer]. My milliners' dummies, for instance, are objects like others and have not been selected to suggest symbolic representations of human beings of legendary or mythological characters. The only titles that I chose for these paintings were conventional, like 'Still Life, Flowers or Landscape', without any implications of strangeness of an unreal world”

Giorgio Morandi (1890–1964) Italian painter

as in Surrealism or in 'Pittura Metafisica' of De Chirico
Source: 1945 - 1964, Interview, 1960, pp. 106-107

Life , World , Art , Flowers

“In explaining things to people, I've come to terms with the fact that a lot of my goals are very Christian in the end. Because people no longer appreciate the taboos of sex, drugs, and rock & roll. I have to take them as far as they've ever been taken before, on a grand scale, in order for the world to realize we have to start over. It's very much like the mythology of the bible, the end of the world, and the antichrist and people are made to make a choice about their faith. I think certain elements of that are correct.”

Marilyn Manson (1969) American rock musician and actor

As quoted in CMJ (January 1997).
1990s

People , World , Faith , Sex

“When you transplant a heart from a baboon into a baby as we did, and you say the body of that baby is sacred, does that profane heart from the baboon become sacred when you place it in the body? Or when you take out a gallbladder and throw it in the garbage, is that a sacred gallbladder in the garbage? Or as soon as it's out of the body it loses its sanctity? You see the silliness of our mythology? Children ask the questions I'm just asking now. Trouble is, children get slapped for asking questions like that because they have no defense. But you can't slap me. I can ask the question. It's a logical question.”

Jack Kevorkian (1928–2011) American pathologist, euthanasia activist

2000s, 2009, Interview with Neil Cavuto (2009)

Children , Question , Heart , Baby

“Now - how can we possibly examine something we use all the time and presuppose in every statement? How can we criticize the terms in which we habitually express our observations? Let us see! The first step in our criticism of commonly-used concepts is to create a measure of criticism, something with which these concepts can be compared. Of course, we shall later want to know a little more about the measuring stick itself; for example, we shall want to know whether it is better than, or perhaps not as good as, the material examined. But in order for this examination to start there must be a measuring-stick in the first place. Therefore, the first step in our criticism of customary concepts and customary reactions is to step outside the circle and either to invent a new conceptual system, for example a new theory, that clashes with the most carefully established observational results and confounds with the most plausible theoretical principles, or to import such a system from outside science, from religion, from mythology, from the ideas of incompetents, or the ramblings of madmen. This step is, again, counter-inductive, Counter-induction is thus both a fact”

Paul Karl Feyerabend book Against Method

science could not exist without it - and a legitimate and much needed move in the game of science.
Pg 68.
Against Method (1975)

Religion , Game , Idea , Science

“When I consider all the circumstances detailed above respecting the Pans, I cannot help believing that, under the mythos, a doctrine or history of a sect is concealed. Cunti, the wife of Pandu (du or God, Pan), wife of the generative power, mother of the Pandavas or devas, daughter of Sura or Syra the Sun—Pandæa only daughter of Cristna or the Sun—Pandion, who had by Medea a son called Medus, the king of the Medes, who had a cousin, the famous Perseus — surely all this is very mythological — an historical parable!”

Godfrey Higgins book Anacalypsis

Vol. I., p. 439.
Anacalypsis (published 1833)

God , History , Sun , Help

“I use the word ‘guru' for him in the mythological sense — all other educationists ask for payment for knowledge imparted; this gentleman paid me and taught me. What a journey it has been, after I met him at the age of 17-and-a-half.”

Kamal Haasan (1954) Indian actor

About Balachander, in “His Master's voice 1 September 2010”

Age , Knowledge , Sense

“The disinterested imaginative core of mythology is what develops into literature, science, philosophy. Religion is applied mythology.”

Northrop Frye (1912–1991) Canadian literary critic and literary theorist

21.101
"Quotes", Notebooks

Religion , Imagination , Literature , Science

“I find myself more and more attracted to the theory, once vigorously debated by scholars, now smothered by tacit consent, that there was no historical Jesus lying behind the stained glass of the gospel mythology.”

Robert M. Price (1954) American theologian

[Price, Robert M., w:Robert M. Price, Christ a Fiction, https://infidels.org/library/modern/robert_price/fiction.html, 27 November 2016, 1997]

Lying

“You see, the Caml garbage collector is like a god from ancient mythology: mighty, but very irritable. If you mess with it, it'll make you suffer in surprising ways.”

Xavier Leroy (1968) French computer scientistand programmer

Sources
Source: Xavier Leroy (2007-11-28), Post to the Caml mailing list, 2007-11-30 http://caml.inria.fr/pub/ml-archives/caml-list/2007/11/d7e444376489e889d3004f6c7d412713.en.html,

God , Way , Suffering

“Theology, for the most part, adopts the personal point of view the point of view of our personal wants, fears, hopes, weaknesses, and shapes the universe with man as the centre. It has no trouble to believe in miracles, because miracles show the triumph of the personal element over impersonal law. Its strongest hold upon the mind of the race was in the pre-scientific age. It is the daughter of mythology, and has made the relation of the unseen powers to man quite as intimate and personal. It looks upon this little corner of the universe as the special theatre of the celestial powers powers to whom it has given the form and attributes of men, and to whom it ascribes curious plans and devices. Its point of view is more helpful and sustaining to the mass of mankind than that of science ever can be, because the mass of mankind are children, and are ruled by their affections and their emotions. Science chills and repels them, because it substitutes a world of force and law for a world of humanistic divinities.”

John Burroughs (1837–1921) American naturalist and essayist

Source: The Light of Day (1900), Ch. III: Science and Theology

Men , Children , Age , World

“I am not far from believing that, in our own societies, history has replaced mythology and fulfils the same function, that for societies without writing and without archives the aim of mythology is to ensure that as closely as possible—complete closeness is obviously impossible—the future will remain faithful to the present and to the past.”

Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908–2009) French anthropologist and ethnologist

Source: Myth and Meaning (1978), Chapter 4 : When Myth Becomes History

Faith , History , Past , Future

“The question of the origin of the universe is one of the most exciting topics for a scientist to deal with. It reaches far beyond its purely scientific significance, since it is related to human existence, to mythology, and to religion. Furthermore, it deals with questions are connected with the fundamental structure of matter, with elementrary particles.”

Victor Frederick Weisskopf (1908–2002) Austrian-born American theoretical physicist

[Victor F. Weisskopf, American Scientist, The Origin of the Universe: An introduction to recent theoretical developments that are linking cosmology and particle physics, 71, 5, September-October 1983, 473–480, http://www.jstor.org/stable/27852239]

Religion , Question , Universe

“[It's a] really smart, faithful adaptation of the book. The book is such a tight page-turner… The character I play is an extreme guy… He's a killer. He wants to be Jesse James. He grew up watching cowboy and Indian movies and wants to be that. Then he meets Mickey Rourke's character, who's named The Black Bird and he wants to partner up with him and be a criminal and kill people. He's a psychotic and very bad guy… The thing about him is, he's not the bad killer, the kind of guy that sits and stews and then has these rageful outbursts. He is this extreme extrovert who never shuts up and tells you ridiculously tall tales about himself and mythologizes everything… Hyperactive, hyper, hyper guy wearing cowboy boots.”

Joseph Gordon-Levitt (1981) American actor, director, producer, and writer

IGN, March 30, 2006 - about his role in Killshot

People , Books , Faith , Guy

“It's so hard to believe in anything anymore, you know what I mean? It's like, religion, you really can't take it seriously, 'cause it seems so mythological, and seems so arbitrary; and then on the other hand, science is just pure empiricism, and by virtue of its method, it excludes metaphysics. – I guess I wouldn't believe in anything if it weren't for my lucky astrology mood watch.”

Steve Martin (1945) American actor, comedian, musician, author, playwright, and producer

Comedy album A Wild and Crazy Guy

Religion , Mood , Science

“The key point today is to establish the universal validity of individual mythology... The artistic moment is therefore that in which the discovery of pre-conscious universal myths comes about, and in the reduction of these into the form of images. It is clear that if the artist is to be able to bring to light zones of myth that are authentic and virginal he must have both an extreme degree of self-awareness and the gifts of iron precision and logic.”

Piero Manzoni (1933–1963) Italian artist

Source: For the Discovery of a Zone of Images', Piero Manzoni, 1957, pp. 16-17

Light , Universe

“Every human society possesses a mythology which is inherited, transmitted and diversified by literature.”

Northrop Frye (1912–1991) Canadian literary critic and literary theorist

Words with Power : Being a Second Study of The Bible and Literature (1990), Introduction, p. xiii http://books.google.com/books?id=ZnSJb6PPnBoC&pg=PP81&lpg=PP81&dq=%22which+is+inherited,+transmitted+and+diversified+by+literature%22&source=bl&ots=xJ1cLDaUCI&sig=m6agYWMBlW0qfDYMA7aX9aNM8IE&hl=en&sa=X&ei=PaCqUsiEM-issQT_4oGAAg&ved=0CDYQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q=%22which%20is%20inherited%2C%20transmitted%20and%20diversified%20by%20literature%22&f=false
"Quotes"

Literature

“It's a book about the history of the Hindus, from 50 million B. C. E. to the present. It says that there is no evidence that Rama was born in the place that is now known as Ayodhya and there is no evidence that there was a Hindu temple on the spot where the Babur Mosque was. And that there is no evidence that Rama and a bunch of monkeys built a bridge from India to Sri Lanka, as the Hindu Right have claimed. That's just mythology, which is lovely, I've studied it all my life, but you don't legislate on the basis of mythology.”

Wendy Doniger (1940) American Indologist

About her book [ The Hindus: An Alternative History].
Q&A with Wendy Doniger, the Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor and author of The Hindus

Love , Life , Books , History

“Somewhere in the other side of nowhere is a place in space beyond time where the Gods of mythology dwell. … These gods dwell in their mythocracies as opposed to your theocracies, democracies, and monocracies. They dwell in a magic world. These Gods can even offer you immortality.”

Sun Ra (1914–1993) American jazz composer and bandleader

As quoted in "Sun Ra : Stranger from Outer Space" by Mike Walsh at missionCreep http://missioncreep.com/mw/sunra.html

God , World , Democracy , Time

“Military mythology has to pretend that real men are in the majority; cowards can never be allowed to feel that they might be the normal ones and the heroes are insane.”

Germaine Greer (1939) Australian feminist author

"Anxiety"
Daddy, We Hardly Knew You (1989)

Men , Feeling

“Schumpter's daring and dashing entrepreneur is now a legendary figure from the distant past - if not from the mythology of capitalism - or is to be found only in the demimonde of business, founding new ice cream parlors or "deep freeze subscription clubs."”

Paul A. Baran (1909–1964) American Marxist economist

Source: The Political Economy Of Growth (1957), Chapter Three, Standstill And Movement Under Monopoly Capitalism, I, p. 77

Business , Distant , Past

“The time has gone by when a Huxley could believe that while science might indeed remould traditional mythology, traditional morals were impregnable and sacrosanct to it. We must learn not to take traditional morals too seriously. And it is just because even the least dogmatic of religions tends to associate itself with some kind of unalterable moral tradition, that there can be no truce between science and religion.
There does not seem to be any particular reason why a religion should not arise with an ethic as fluid as Hindu mythology, but it has not yet arisen. Christianity has probably the most flexible morals of any religion, because Jesus left no code of law behind him like Moses or Muhammad, and his moral precepts are so different from those of ordinary life that no society has ever made any serious attempt to carry them out, such as was possible in the case of Israel and Islam. But every Christian church has tried to impose a code of morals of some kind for which it has claimed divine sanction. As these codes have always been opposed to those of the gospels a loophole has been left for moral progress such as hardly exists in other religions. This is no doubt an argument for Christianity as against other religions, but not as against none at all, or as against a religion which will frankly admit that its mythology and morals are provisional. That is the only sort of religion that would satisfy the scientific mind, and it is very doubtful whether it could properly be called a religion at all.”

J. B. S. Haldane (1892–1964) Geneticist and evolutionary biologist

Daedalus or Science and the Future (1923)

Life , Religion , Law , Learning

“I always saw a close kinship between the needs of "pure" mathematics and a certain hero of Greek mythology, Antaeus. The son of Earth, he had to touch the ground every so often in order to reestablish contact with his Mother; otherwise his strength waned. To strangle him, Hercules simply held him off the ground. Back to mathematics. Separation from any down-to-earth input could safely be complete for long periods — but not forever. In particular, the mathematical study of Brownian motion deserved a fresh contact with reality.”

Benoît Mandelbrot (1924–2010) Polish-born, French and American mathematician

A Theory of Roughness (2004)

Mathematics , Reality , Study

“In this sense Marxism performs the function of a religion, and its efficacy is of a religious character. But it is a caricature and a bogus form of religion, since it presents its temporal eschatology as a scientific system, which religious mythologies do not purport to be.”

Leszek Kolakowski (1927–2009) Philosopher, historian of ideas

Epilogue, p. 1208
Main Currents Of Marxism (1978)

Religion , Sense

“The actual past is brittle, ever-dimming + ever more problematic to access + reconstruct: in contrast, the virtual past is malleable, ever-brightening + ever more difficult to circumvent/expose as fraudulent. The present presses the virtual past into its own service, to lend credence to its mythologies + legitimacy to the imposition of will.”

David Mitchell book Cloud Atlas

"Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery", p. 340 (Nook edition)
Cloud Atlas (2004)

Past

“The Bible has entered much of my work as have Latin and Greek mythology and verse.”

Dermot Healy (1947–2014) Irish writer

Penguin Group (2013) A Conversation with Dermot Healy http://www.us.penguingroup.com/static/rguides/us/long_time_no_see.html, Penguin US, accessed May 5, 2013

“Can there be a demythologizing interpretation that discloses the truth of the kerygma as kerygma for those who do not think mythologically?”

Rudolf Karl Bultmann (1884–1976) German theologian

Kann es eine entmythologisierende Interpretation geben, die die Wahrheit des Kerygmas als Kerygmas für den nicht mythologisch denkenden Menschen aufdeckt?
Source: New Testament and Mythology and Other Basic Writings (1941), p. 14

Truth , Thinking

“University professors, restricted in this way, are quite happy about the matter, for their real concern is to earn with credit an honest livelihood for themselves and also for their wives and children and moreover to enjoy a certain prestige in the eyes of the public. On the other hand, the deeply stirred mind of the real philosopher, whose whole concern is to look for the key to our existence, as mysterious as it is precarious, is regarded by them as something mythological, if indeed the man so affected does not even appear to them to be obsessed by a monomania, should he ever be met with among them. For that a man could really be in dead earnest about philosophy does not as a rule occur to anyone, least of all to a lecturer thereon; just as the most sceptical Christian is usually the Pope. It has, therefore, been one of the rarest events for a genuine philosopher to be at the same time a lecturer in philosophy.”

Arthur Schopenhauer book Parerga and Paralipomena

Inzwischen bleiben die solchermaaßen beschränkten Universitätsphilosophie bei der Sache ganz wohlgemuth; weil ihr eigentlicher Ernst darin liegt, mit Ehren ein redliches Auskommen für sich, nebst Weib und Kind, zu erwerben, auch ein gewisses Ansehn vor den Leuten zu genießen; hingegen das tiefbewegte Gemüth eines wirklichen Philosophen, dessen ganzer und großer Ernst im Aufsuchen eines Schlüssels zu unserm, so rätselhaften wie mißlichen Daseyn liegt, von ihnen zu den mythologischen Wesen gezählt wird; wenn nicht etwa» gar der damit Behaftete, sollte er ihnen je vorkommen, ihnen als von Monomanie besessen erscheint. Denn daß es mit der Philosophie so recht eigentlicher, bitterer Ernst seyn könne, läßt wohl, in der Regel, kein Mensch sich weniger träumen, als ein Docent derselben; gleichwie der ungläubigste Christ der Papst zu seyn pflegt. Daher gehört es denn auch zu den seltensten Fällen, daß ein wirklicher Philosoph zugleich ein Docent der Philosophie gewesen wäre.
Sämtliche Werke, Bd. 5, p. 153, E. Payne, trans. (1974) Vol. 1, p. 141
Parerga and Paralipomena (1851), On Philosophy in the Universities

Children , Way , Universe , Appearance

“They [nine women in Hindu mythology] are Ahalya, Draupadi, Tara, Kunti, Mandodari, Sita, Savitri, Parvati, Damayanti, Maitreyi and Shakuntala. All of them were not held in the same degree of esteem and reverence. The first five women, known as pancakanya, may well be remembered in daily prayers but none of them is regarded as an ideal woman, at least not recommended by anyone for emulation by others.”

Kunti character from Indian epic Mahabharata

Prabhati Mukherjee in: Hindu Women: Normative Models http://books.google.com/books?id=6ovdvq7mjpUC&pg=PA39, Orient Blackswan, 1 January 1994, p. 48

Women

“Mythology is wondrous, a balm for the soul. But its problems cannot be ignored. At worst, it buys inspiration at the price of physical impossibility […]. At best, it purveys the same myopic view of history that made this most fascinating subject so boring and misleading in grade school as a sequential take of monarchs and battles.”

Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) American evolutionary biologist

"Baseball and the Two Faces of Janus", p. 259; originally published as "The Virtues of Nakedness" in The New York Review of Books (1990-10-11)
Triumph and Tragedy in Mudville (2003)

School , Soul , History , Problem

“The object of a dialogical-liberterian action is not to 'dislodge' the oppressed from a mythological reality in order to 'bind' them to another reality. On the contrary, the object of dialogical action is to make it possible for the oppressed, by perceiving their adhesion, to opt to transform an unjust reality.”

Paulo Freire (1921–1997) educator and philosopher

Pedagogia do oprimido (Pedagogy of the Oppressed) (1968, English trans. 1970)

Reality

“Madonna won my undying loyalty by reviving and re-creating the hard glamour of the studio-era Hollywood movie queens, figures of mythological grandeur. Contemporary feminism cut itself off from history and bankrupted itself when it spun its paranoid fantasy of male oppressors and female sex-object victims. Woman is the dominant sex. Woman’s sexual glamour has bewitched and destroyed men since Delilah and Helen of Troy.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Sex, Art and American Culture : New Essays (1992), p. 10

Men , Sex , History , Loyalty