In Europe life retreats out of the cold, and exquisite fireside myths have resulted—Balder, Persephone—but [in India] the retreat is from the source of life, the treacherous sun, and no poetry adorns it because disillusionment cannot be beautiful...
A priest is a functionary of a social sort. The society worships certain deities in a certain way, and the priest becomes ordained as a functionary to carry out that ritual. The deity to whom he is devoted is a deity that was there before he came alo...
People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will ha...
People like to make up stories about things they don’t understand, so there are over a thousand myths about the moon. One legend claims that on the surface is everything that was wasted here on Earth: misspent time, squandered wealth, broken vows, ...
One finds the same basic mythological themes in all the religions of the world, from the most primitive to the most sophisticated, from the North American plains to European forests to Polynesian atolls. The imagery of myth is a language, a lingua fr...
We know from myths and fairy tales that there are many different kinds of powers in this world. One child is given a light saber, another a wizard's education. The trick is not to amass all the different kinds of power, but to use well the kind you'v...
She once said her songs were "mostly about myths, spirits, that kind of thing. Not fairies, stronger than that." Not fairies. Stronger than that: there's a fine phrase to bear in mind. Her lyrics are about the things that drive, or repulse, or empowe...
Many myths and religions have some kind of threat of retribution from their god or gods, and their doctrines warn of the dangers of doing various forbidden things. Why? Because memes involving danger are the ones we pay attention to! As oral traditio...
--perhaps a soul is what you have spent your life making, not a piece of metaphysical equipment shipped ready-made from the factory, another myth like original sin, which you were outfitted with at birth and could somehow lose, like men high and low ...
One myth that has become established in the self-development arena is that it only takes 21 days to form a new habit. This simply isn’t true in all cases. Sometimes it takes a shorter time, sometimes a longer time, and sometimes old habits are so h...
It's not enough just to do those things anymore; what you must do instead if you want success on any large scale is either figure out a way of getting yourself associated in the audience's mind with their pieties and their sense of 'community,' i.e. ...
If I've learnt one thing, it's that I need to surround myself with people who want to know the real Pete Wentz, not some myth they've concocted from a bunch of press clippings. I can open the door a centimetre wide, and some people think I'm showing ...
When you move on in life, you always leave behind some things- some myths and some mysteries, that cannot be fathomed by the heart, without going back to the past and visiting yourself again; in that time, at that place. You can only understand such ...
God is at work telling a story of restoration and redemption through your family. Never buy into the myth that you need to become the " right" kind of parent before God can use you in your children's lives. Instead learn to cooperate with whatever Go...
At all ages, if [fantasy and myth] is used well by the author and meets the right reader, it has the same power: to generalize while remaining concrete, to present in palpable form not concepts or even experiences but whole classes of experience, and...
Myths tend to spiral out of control. Do you howl at the full moon and steal maidens to devour?" "Depends on the maiden," he said. Was he flirting with me? Devouring didn't really go with flirting, but his tone of voice did. Was this how werewolves fl...
No, the state is anything but the result of a contract! No one with even just an ounce of common sense would agree to such a contract. I have a lot of contracts in my files, but nowhere is there one like this. The state is the result of aggressive fo...
A book for children, like the myths and folktales that tend to slide into it, is really a blueprint for dealing with life. For that reason, it might have a happy ending, because nobody ever solved a problem while believing it was hopeless. It might p...
This is the mythosphere. It's made up of all the stories, theories and beliefs, legends, myths and hopes, that are generated here on Earth. As you can see, it's constantly growing and moving as people invent new tales to tell or find new things to be...
[Comedies], in the ancient world, were regarded as of a higher rank than tragedy, of a deeper truth, of a more difficult realization, of a sounder structure, and of a revelation more complete. The happy ending of the fairy tale, the myth, and the div...
Capitalism’s grow-or-die imperative stands radically at odds with ecology’s imperative of interdependence and limit. The two imperatives can no longer coexist with each other; nor can any society founded on the myth that they can be reconciled ho...
