Philip Seymour Hoffman Quotes

Apparently, the pathfinder duck is a psychological archetype in certain cultures.

Myths give us our sense of personal identity, answering the question, 'Who am I?'

Sometimes you pick up on the myth and it's just an accident. I think it comes naturally out of people, and some people are aware of it.

Every culture has their myths that people are aware of and share.

Symbols are specific acts or figures, while myths develop and elaborate these symbols into a story which contains characters and several episodes. The myth is thus more inclusive. But both symbol and myth have the same function psychologically; they are man's way of expressing the quintessence of his experience - his way of seeing his life, his self-image and his relations to the world of his fellow men and of nature - in a total figure which at the same moment carries the vital meaning of this experience.

...culture is useless unless it is constantly challenged by counter culture. People create culture; culture creates people. It is a two-way street. When people hide behind a culture, you know that's a dead culture.

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

The only reason we find structure in stories is because it's there naturally in human interaction, and in the way that people tell stories.

In fact, the whole of mythology could be taken as a sort of projection of the collective unconscious

When I was a teenager, black pride became newly popular again. Suddenly a lot of black people were wearing the fake kente cloth and red black and green and Bob Marley. That was sort of my window into finding my own identity as a black person.

You have to be really careful to watch out for the difference between banding together, and being grouped together by people who don't understand you.

Our powerful hunger for myth is a hunger for community. The person without a myth is a person without a home...To be a member of one's community is to share in its myths.

I think that critiquing the myths of our society and helping people find their way through them is a very important thing. It's a theme that goes through all of my work.

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

the ancient people perceived the world and themselves within that world as part of an ancient continuous story composed of innumerable bundles of other stories.

If you're Filipino, you're the beaner of the Asian community 'cause you're just like us. You're indigenous people that got banged by some Spaniards. That's why you have names like Kwan Ping Del Toro.

The myth is the public dream and the dream is the private myth.

A life without stories would be no life at all. And stories bound us, did they not, one to another, the living to the dead, people to animals, people to the land?

The demonization of Islam and immigrants shows that perception of difference remains one of our biggest problems, and maybe always will be for a species that began in small groups competing with other groups for resources. These apparently competing forces for sameness and difference sometimes even seem to be mutually reinforcing. The homogenizing force of globalization tends to make many people feel they are on the losing side, economically and culturally, and it is they who are most easily turned against those "others" who are demonized by demagogues.

It cannot be that the people should grow in grace unless they give themselves to reading. A reading people will always be a knowing people.

I kept my culture. I kept the music of my roots. Through my music I became this voice and image of Africa and the people without even realising.

The myth is the public domain and the dream is the private myth. If your private myth, your dream, happens to coincide with that of the society, you are in good accord with your group. If it isn't, you've got a long adventure in the dark forest ahead of you.

Ah, how good it is to be among people who are reading!

There is something so deeply visceral about libraries for me-rooms and rooms full of people dreaming and remembering.

I believe in racial memory too. I'm sure I've got ancient African blood in me that has something to do with what I am.