Mythology Matters About Matters of Myth, and Why Myth Matters
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Here are some of our favorite quotes giving insight into myths and mythology. We have not included any material referring to myths in the sense of being something false or merely made-up, or quotes that are merely humor. 

MYTH QUOTES:
This never happened, but it always is.

                 Sallustius


Myths are clues to the spiritual potentialities of the human life.


                 Joseph Campbell
 

Myths aren’t fairy tales or legends—they’re an honest attempt to explain mysteries.
   
              John J. Geddes
  
Mythology is not a lie, mythology is poetry, it is metaphorical. It has been well said that mythology is the penultimate truth--penultimate because the ultimate cannot be put into words. It is beyond words. Beyond images, beyond that bounding rim of the Buddhist Wheel of Becoming. Mythology pitches the mind beyond that rim, to what can be known but not told.                                                                                            

               Joseph Campbell
   

Mythology can be defined as the sacred history of humankind. 

               Gerald Hausman
   
I believe that legends and myths are largely made of “truth,” and indeed present aspects of it that can only be received in this mode.
  
              J.R.R. Tolkien


So that the lover of myths, which are a compact of wonders, is by the same token a lover of wisdom.

              Aristotle
   

Myths are lies that tell the truth.

               Phil Cousineau


We cannot afford to take mythology at face value.

               Indiana Jones, The Last Crusade

Myth embodies the nearest approach to absolute truth than can be stated in words.


              Ananda Coomaraswamy
   

Myths are seldom simple, and never irresponsible.

              
Robert Graves


Myth is the foundation of life. It is the timeless pattern, the religious formula to which life shapes itself.

              
Thomas Mann

Myth is an attempt to narrate a whole human experience, of which the purpose is too deep, going too deep in the blood and soul, for mental explanation or description.

               D.H. Lawrence


Myths and creeds are heroic struggles to comprehend the truth in the world.

               Ansel Adams

Nights through dreams tell the myths forgotten by the day. 

               Carl Jung


Myths are public dreams, dreams are private myths.

               Joseph Campbell

Myth is not about what happened in past times; myth is about what happens to people all of the time.

               Michael Meade
   

Both dreams and myths are important communications from ourselves to ourselves. If we do not understand the language in which they are written, we miss a great deal of what we know and tell ourselves in those hours when we are not busy manipulating the outside world.

               Erich Fromm


I believe in everything until it is disproved. So I believe in fairies, the myths, dragons. It all exists, even if it’s in your mind. Who’s to say that dreams and nightmares aren’t as real as the here and now?

               John Lennon

The mythic is everywhere.

              Phil Cousineau

True myths, ancient and modern, stop time because they emerge from somewhere beyond time. 

              Phil Cousineau
   

Myths are experienced in ordinary life, as everyday epiphanies.

              Phil Cousineau
   

Myths are made for the imagination to breathe life into them.
   
              Albert Camus 


There is an unknown room in the soul that is constantly turning the stuff of daydreams into myths for us, helping us to get at meaning we can’t get to through the front door.

              Phil Cousineau 


Myth is much more important and true than history. History is just journalism and you know how reliable that is.
   
              Joseph Campbell
 

A myth is far truer than history, for a history only gives a story of the shadows, whereas a myth gives a story of the substances that cast the shadows.

            Annie Besant

I’ve always preferred mythology to history. History is truth that becomes an illusion. Mythology is an illusion that becomes reality.
 
              Jean Cocteau


Myths are ... neither primitive nor untrue. They are, rather, a kind of poetry that helps us make sense of the world and our place in it.

               Stephen H. Furrer
   

When we lose our myths we lose our place in the universe.
   
              Madeleine L'Engle
   

The images of Myth are reflections of Spiritual and Depth potentialities of every one of us. Through contemplating those we evoke those powers in our own lives to operate through ourselves.
   
              Joseph Campbell
   

Old myths, old gods, old heroes have never died. They are only sleeping at the bottom of our mind, waiting for our call. We have need for them. They represent the wisdom of our race.
              
              Stanley Kunitz
   
I drag my myth around with me.
   
              Orson Welles
   
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.
   
              Joseph Campbell
   
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
   
Without a knowledge of mythology much of the elegant literature of our own language cannot be understood and appreciated.
   
              Thomas Bulfinch
   
I therefore claim to show, not how men think in myths, but how myths operate in men's minds without their being aware of the fact.
   
              Claude Lévi-Strauss


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