Riane Eisler Quotes

Whenever men have looked for something solid on which to found their lives, they have chosen not the facts in which the world abounds, but the myths of an immemorial imagination.

Admixing the inner space of dream, trance, and myth with the events of everyday existence characterized every belief system worldwide before the Greeks.....time meandered back and forth between reality and myth.

In one aspect, my works record the history of the development of Chinese society. Concern about the situation of Chinese reality is one important theme of my works. I am trying to ask, 'How does our society develop? What are the problems in our society? Where is our direction leading?'

The only difference is that religion is much better organised and has been around much longer, but it's the same story with different characters and different costumes.

Asian literature is evolving with the people. It's always a reflection on what's happening to the culture at large.

If people believe something is true, then it is even if it isn't.

I always have difficulty with the Greek tragic plays. I think the difficulty one has - which is a serious problem - is the question of belief. Do you believe in the myth that the play expresses? Do you believe in it as myth or as reality? With any play, you have to believe in it as reality. You can't act a myth.

I don't want to act like the witch trials all over New England were warranted, but when you live in a culture that believes something is real, it feels very real.

I do believe that there are places where the mythological and the literal touch.

Our beliefs are what create our experiences. As we change our beliefs, we alter our perception, our version of reality.

The most important question anyone can ask is: What myth am I living?

The same process that makes AA so effective—the power of a group to teach individuals how to believe—happens whenever people come together to help one another change. Belief is easier when it occurs within a community.

The difficulty with humanity's previous attempts at reinventing itself is that we've always started with behaviors rather than with beliefs.

Myth is what we call other people's religion.

All systems require myths for their longevity.

The world is such-and-such or so-and-so only because we tell ourselves that that is the way it is.

Everything hangs on one's thinking.

I feel as though the cardboard box of my own reality has been flattened and blown open. Now I can see the edge of the world.

Those who professed themselves unable to believe in the reality of human progress ought to cheer themselves up, as the students under examination had conceivably been cheered up, by a short study of the Middle Ages. The hydrogen bomb, the South African Government, Chioang Kaidick, Senator McCarthy himself, would then seem a light price to pay for no longer being in the Middle Ages.

We are always trying to convert people to a belief in our own explanation of the universe. We think that the more people there are who believe as we do, the more certain it will be that what we believe is the truth. But it doesn't work that way at all.

Our thinking is permeated by our historical myths

Stories are the secret reservoir of values: change the stories individuals and nations live by and tell themselves, and you change the individuals and nations.

Well, I think I'm not a non-believer, and I'm not a believer. But, on the other hand, I couldn't give you a good enough reason why EVP doesn't exist. I don't know enough about it, so how could I say it's not true. Plus, a person's reality is a person's reality so that's your belief system. It's all perception anyway, isn't it.

If both Church and fairy-tale belong to humanity, they may occasionally cross circles, without injury to either.