Yuval Noah Harari Quotes

We are the storytelling animal.

The human world is made of stories, not people.

I think human beings wouldn't be human without narrative fiction.

I think there is a human instinct to tell stories, no matter who you are or where you live.

We are the only animal that tells stories.

Stories are told over time, and so they naturally accrue meanings.

As a folklorist, I have come to believe that no piece of folklore continues to be transmitted unless it means something - even if neither the speaker nor the audience can articulate what that meaning might be.

Storytelling is essentially what we do.

Stories bring us together. We can talk about them and bond over them. They are shared knowledge, shared legend, and shared history; often, they shape our shared future.

The human race has always defined itself through narration. That isn't going to change just because we've gone electronic. What is changing is that now we're allowing corporations to tell our stories for us.

The human world is made of stories, not people. The people the stories use to tell themselves are not to be blamed

We're dead as a species if we don't tell stories, because then we don't know who we are.

And all who told it added something new, and all who heard it, made enlargements too.

You're never going to kill storytelling, because it's built into the human plan. We come with it.

I've always been fascinated by the grassroots folktale level of a culture, and as a storyteller, I have to follow what seems to be leading me on.

Whether in cave paintings or the latest uses of the Internet, human beings have always told their histories and truths through parable and fable. We are inveterate storytellers.

There is something in human beings that loves stories.

Each time, storytellers clothed the naked body of the myth in their own traditions, so that listeners could relate more easily to its deeper meaning.

We are made of the stories we have heard and read all through our lives.

I love studying folklore and legends. The stories that people passed down for a thousand years without any sort of marketing support are obviously saying something appealing about the basic human condition.

I think that we need mythology. We need a bedrock of story and legend in order to live our lives coherently.

There's a reason that all societies and cultures and small bands of humans engage in myth-making. Fundamentally, it is to help us understand ourselves.

Humankind has been telling stories forever and will be telling stories forever.

Before we were born, a whole society of storytellers was already here. The storytellers who were here before us taught us how to be human.

Film is just a different version of what we did round the campfire when we were Neanderthals. We tell stories so people can learn things and relativise things.