Mythology Quotes

“Sometimes the hardest power to master is the power of yielding. -Hestia”
― Rick Riordan

“When they told him this, Ransom at last understood why mythology was what it was -- gleams of celestial strength and beauty falling on a jungle of filth and imbecility.”
― C.S. Lewis, Perelandra

“Mythology is composed by poets out of their insights and realizations. Mythologies are not invented; they are found. You can no more tell us what your dream is going to be tonight than we can invent a myth. Myths come from the mystical region of essential experience.”
― Joseph Campbell

“Gods and politics are the tools with which the godless and unprincipled manipulate the gullible.”
― Janet E. Morris

“The battlefield is symbolic of the field of life, where every creature lives on the death of another. A realization of the inevitable guilt of life may so sicken the heart, that like Hamlet, or like Arjuna, one may refuse to go on with it. On the other hand, like most of the rest of us, one may invent a false finally unjustified image of oneself as an exceptional phenomenon in the world--not guilty as others are, but justified in one's inevitable sinning, because one represents the good. Such self-righteousness leads to a misunderstanding, not only of oneself, but of the nature of both Man and the Cosmos. The goal of the myth is to dispel the need for such life-ignorance by affecting a reconciliation of the individual consciousness with the universal will, and this is affected through a realization of the true relationship of the passing phenomena of time to the imperishable life that lives and dies in all.”
― Joseph Campbell, The Hero With a Thousand Faces

“We must have a new mythology, but it must place itself at the service of ideas, it must become a mythology of reason. Mythology must become philosophical, so that the people may become rational, and philosophy must become mythological, so that philosophers may become sensible. If we do not give ideas a form that is aesthetic, i.e., mythological, they will hold no interest for people.”
― Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

“Nay, father.
Some of us have been killing giants today and aren't in the mood to have a tea party.
- Thor, God of Thunder”
― Matt Fraction, Thor: Ages of Thunder

“I always thought they were fabulous monsters!" said the Unicorn. "Is it alive?"
"It can talk," said Haigha, solemnly.
The Unicorn looked dreamily at Alice, and said, "Talk, child."
Alice could not help her lips curling up into a smile as she began: "Do you know, I always thought Unicorns were fabulous monsters, too! I never saw one alive before!"
"Well, now that we have seen each other," said the Unicorn, "if you'll believe in me, I'll believe in you. Is that a bargain?”
― Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland / Through the Looking-Glass

“Myths have a very long memory.”
― Bryan Sykes, Saxons, Vikings, and Celts: The Genetic Roots of Britain and Ireland

“But a myth, to speak plainly, to me is like a menu in a fancy French restaurant: glamorous, complicated camouflage for a fact you wouldn't otherwise swallow, like maybe lima beans.”
― William Peter Blatty, The Exorcist

“Oral myths are closer to the genetic conclusions than the often ambiguous scientific evidence of archaeology.”
― Bryan Sykes, Saxons, Vikings, and Celts: The Genetic Roots of Britain and Ireland

“We hold this myth to be potential
Not self-evident but equational
Another Dimension
Of another kind of Living Life”
― Sun Ra

“In our time... a man whose enemies are faceless bureaucrats almost never wins. It is our equivalent to the anger of the gods in ancient times. But those gods you must understand were far more imaginative than our tiny bureaucrats. They spoke from mountaintops not from tiny airless offices. They rode clouds. They were possessed of passion. They had voices and names. Six thousand years of civilization have brought us to this.”
― Chaim Potok, Davita's Harp

“I know that you are wise. When you hear a true story, there is a part of you that responds to it regardless of art, regardless of evidence…You believe that the story is true, because you responded to it from that sense of truth deep within you. But that sense of truth does not respond to a story's factuality...[rather] to a story's causality - whether it faithfully shows the way the universe functions.”
― Orson Scott Card, Xenocide

“from "Semele Recycled"

But then your great voice rang out under the skies
my name!-- and all those private names
for the parts and places that had loved you best.
And they stirred in their nest of hay and dung.
The distraught old ladies chasing their lost altar,
and the seers pursuing my skull, their lost employment,
and the tumbling boys, who wanted the magic marbles,
and the runaway groom, and the fisherman's thirteen children,
set up such a clamor, with their cries of "Miracle!"
that our two bodies met like a thunderclap
in midday-- right at the corner of that wretched field
with its broken fenceposts and startled, skinny cattle.
We fell in a heap on the compost heap
and all our loving parts made love at once,
while the bystanders cheered and prayed and hid their eyes
and then went decently about their business.

And here is is, moonlight again; we've bathed in the river
and are sweet and wholesome once more.
We kneel side by side in the sand;
we worship each other in whispers.
But the inner parts remember fermenting hay,
the comfortable odor of dung, the animal incense,
and passion, its bloody labor,
its birth and rebirth and decay.”
― Carolyn Kizer

“They yoked themselves to a car and drew her all the long way through dust and heat. Everyone admired their filial piety when they arrived and the proud and happy mother standing before the statue prayed that Hera would reward them by giving them the best gift in her power. As she finished her prayer the two lads sank to the ground. They were smiling and they looked as if they were peacefully asleep but they were dead. (Biton and Cleobis)”
― Edith Hamilton, Mythology

“The Dreaming is always; forever... it's always happening, and us mob, we're part of it, all the time, everywhere, and every-when too.”
― Kate Constable, Crow Country

“Persephone is just a name for a spirit of beauty at a certain time in history. I'm sure we could argue a biblical place for her if it matters. Your wife has the name of that pagan goddess, but the fact remains that she's your mortal bride in the Year of Our Lord 1888- and she's Catholic, so pray for her, damn it, I don't care how confusing it is. And pray for us, to anyone. If the dead are about to flood Athens, divine goodwill couldn't hurt. Your prayers can be in Hindu, if you like. Now go home.”
― Leanna Renee Hieber, The Darkly Luminous Fight for Persephone Parker

“She quickly interpreted him into her mythology but if, at first, he was a herbivorous lion, later he became a unicorn devouring raw meat.”
― Angela Carter, Love

“The voice blurs and fades, like a faint cry riding on the tails of the wind. I yawn and stretch, rolling over. I fold my pillow under my head and wait for the voice to return. When I hear nothing but the sound of my own breathing I allow myself to drift back into a dreamless slumber.”
― Lauren Hammond, Asphodel

“Demon” means “knowledge” in Greek. “Science” means “knowledge” in Latin. A jurisdictional dispute is exposed, even if we look no further.”
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

“A too often forgotten truth is that you can live through actual events of history and completely miss the underlying reality of what's going. What history misses, the myth clearly expresses. The myth in the hands of a genius give us a clear picture of the inner import of life itself.”
― Tom Harpur, The Pagan Christ: Recovering the Lost Light

“Wait a minute, hold on... The dude dies, and the girl cries so hard that she gets turned into a fountain?”
― Caroline Goode, Cupidity

“A tremendous mystery unfolds in front of our senses every waking hour of our lives; a mystery more profound, more tantalizing, more penetrating and urgent than any novel or thriller. This unfolding mystery is nature’s challenge to us. Are we paying enough attention to it?”
― Bernardo Kastrup, More Than Allegory: On Religious Myth, Truth And Belief

“Sky was the first god. Robert knew that there was only one God and he had a Son who was also God, but there were gods who had vanished: the gods of thunder, of fire, of the wide oceans of the earth.”
― Arthur Slade, Dust

“Pegasus's dad was poseidon, the god of the sea, and his mom was Medusa, and evil Gorgon who had fangs and lizard skin and living snakes for hair. And you thought your family was weird.”
― Evan Kuhlman, The Last Invisible Boy

“We did not get on much further, for in another moment we were caught by a terrific squall from the West that snapped the forestays of the mast so that it fell aft, while all the ship’s gear tumbled about at the bottom of the vessel. The mast fell upon the head of the helmsman in the ship’s stern, so that the bones of his head were crushed to pieces, and he fell overboard as though he were diving, with no more life left in him. “Then Jove let fly with his thunderbolts, and the ship went round and round, and was filled with fire and brimstone as the lightning struck it. The men all fell into the sea; they were carried about in the water round the ship, looking like so many sea-gulls, but the god presently deprived them of all chance of getting home again.”
― Homer, The Odyssey

“The myths of Hylas, Adonis, Lityerses, and Linus describes the annual mourning for the sacred king of his boy-surrogate, sacrificed to placate the goddess of vegetation. The same surrogate appears in the legend of Triptolemus, who rode in a serpent-drawn chariot and carried sacks of corn to symbolize that his death brought wealth. Plutus (‘wealthy’), begotten in the ploughed field from whom Hades euphemistic title ‘Pluto’ is borrowed.”
― Robert Graves, The Greek Myths 1

“for there is nothing dearer to a man than his own country and his parents, and however splendid a home he may have in a foreign country, if it be far from father or mother, he does not care about it.”
― Homer, The Odyssey

“Then we entered the Straits in great fear of mind, for on the one hand was Scylla, and on the other dread Charybdis kept sucking up the salt water. As she vomited it up, it was like the water in a cauldron when it is boiling over upon a great fire, and the spray reached the top of the rocks on either side. When she began to suck again, we could see the water all inside whirling round and round, and it made a deafening sound as it broke against the rocks. We could see the bottom of the whirlpool all black with sand and mud, and the men were at their wits ends for fear. While we were taken up with this, and were expecting each moment to be our last, Scylla pounced down suddenly upon us and snatched up my six best men. I was looking at once after both ship and men, and in a moment I saw their hands and feet ever so high above me, struggling in the air as Scylla was carrying them off, and I heard them call out my name in one last despairing cry. As a fisherman, seated, spear in hand, upon some jutting rock throws bait into the water to deceive the poor little fishes, and spears them with the ox’s horn with which his spear is shod, throwing them gasping on to the land as he catches them one by one—even so did Scylla land these panting creatures on her rock and munch them up at the mouth of her den, while they screamed and stretched out their hands to me in their mortal agony. This was the most sickening sight that I saw throughout all my voyages.”
― Homer, The Odyssey