Hannah Arendt Quotes

History is like Santa Claus: a language construction. We have some registers about the existence of Santa and history - the presents under the tree, the archives - but none have really seen them.

Stories--individual stories, family stories, national stories--are what stitch together the disparate elements of human existence into a coherent whole. We are story animals.

Man is fed with fables through life, and leaves it in the belief he knows something of what has been passing, when in truth he knows nothing but what has passed under his own eyes.

At the heart of every legend there is a grain of truth.

After all, I believe that legends and myths are largely made of 'truth'.

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.

Every human society possesses a mythology which is inherited, transmitted and diversified by literature.

It is only the story...that saves our progeny from blundering like blind beggars into the spikes of the cactus fence.The story is our escort;without it,we are blind.Does the blind man own his escort?No,neither do we the story;rather,it is the story that owns us.

There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.

After all, 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; and long ago certain truths and modes of this kind were discovered and must always reappear.

Stories are made up by people who make them up. If they work, they get retold. There's the magic of it.

No place is a place until things that have happened in it are remembered in history, ballads, yarns, legends, or monuments. Fictions serve as well as facts.

Real myths are often strange and startlingly unfamiliar, and don't always give up their meanings easily; you have to tease them out, and for me, that's one of the pleasures of reading older collections of lore.

A myth is more powerful - and more lasting - than reality.

Legends die hard. They survive as truth rarely does.

And it has some weight, I mean, the whole history of the gargoyles, that's some wonderful stuff.

If history were taught in the form of stories, it would never be forgotten.

All myths that are something more than fancies gain rather than lose in value with time, by reason of the accretions of human experience.

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

We should burn all libraries and allow to remain only that which everyone knows by heart. A beautiful age of the legend would then begin.

Nowhere else is there so large and consistent a body of oral tradition about the national and mythical heroes as amongst the Gaels.

Stories always seem to get better with age.

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.

Legends are material to be moulded, and not facts to be recorded.

On the day when man told the story of his life to man, history was born.