Mark Rothko Quotes

Myth continues to be a valuable way to understand parts of our nature that we can't quantify.

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

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.

Humans live through their myths and only endure their realities.

A myth is something that never was but that is always happening.

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.

The myth works to make the very real things people don't want to look at visible for them.

A wonder tale can be truer than true," I said. I had learned (...) that the deepest kind of truth can be found in the strangest and wildest of stories. One may not meet a fire-breathing dragon on the way to the well. One may not encounter an army of toothed snakes in the woodshed. That does not make the wisdom in those tales any less real.

What flows into you from myth is not truth but reality (truth is always about something, but reality is that about which truth is), and therefore, every myth becomes the father of innumerable truths on the abstract level.

I realise that there's something about fantasy, whether it's written by the Grimm Brothers or J. K. Rowling or Thorne or J. M. Barrie, that it gets closer to the human experience than realism every could.

I think the Christ-myth stories make great stories, whether it's 'The Matrix' or 'Braveheart,' they all are tapping into some kind of deep myth in our DNA, and by myth I don't necessarily mean false.

Of course, the whole mythology of the world of 'It' is very attractive to me.

The real world is much smaller than the imaginary

We live in our myths, we only endure reality.

Myths are fun, as long as you don't confuse them with the truth.

The man who speaks with primordial images, speaks with a thousand tongues.

Symbolism is no mere idle fancy or corrupt degeneration: it is inherent in the very texture of human life.

The moment there is imagination there is myth

There are metaphors more real than the people who walk in the street.

If swans weren't real myths'd make up.

Why are so many of us enspelled by myths and folk stories in this modern age? Why do we continue to tell the same old tales, over and over again? I think it's because these stories are not just fantasy. They're about real life. We've all encountered wicked wolves, found fairy godmothers, and faced trial by fire. We've all set off into unknown woods at one point in life or another. We've all had to learn to tell friend from foe and to be kind to crones by the side of the road. . . .

Myth is the hidden part of every story, the buried part, the region that is still unexplored because there are as yet no words to enable us to get there. Myth is nourished by silence as well as by words.

Fantasy is not antirational, but pararational; not realistic but surrealistic, a heightening of reality. In Freud's terminology, it employs primary not secondary process thinking. It employs archetypes which, as Jung warned us, are dangerous things. Fantasy is nearer to poetry, to mysticism, and to insanity than naturalistic fiction is. It is a wilderness, and those who go there should not feel too safe.

The poem is a little myth of man's capacity of making life meaningful.

You ride astride the imaginary in order to hunt down the real.