Hugo Ball Quotes

In the ancient times, bards went around singing the epics, which were storehouses of philosophy.

I'm not a new-agey person, but narrative is ancient and wise and generous.

Mythology is a vast body of knowledge that has not been tapped.

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

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.

Stories always seem to get better with age.

Folktales are real.

I get a lot of inspiration from research in mythology and folklore. I find that, you know, stories people told each other thousands of years ago are still relevant now.

Legend: A lie that has attained the dignity of age.

My thoughts fly to the old Icelandic storytellers who created our classics, whose personalities were so bound up with the masses that their names, unlike their lives' work, have not been preserved for posterity.

The art of storytelling is reaching its end because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out.

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.

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.

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.

I think of myself... as a troubadour, a village storyteller, the guy in the shadows of the campfire.

That is to say, epic poetry has been invented many times and independently; but, as the needs which prompted the invention have been broadly similar, so the invention itself has been.

If you look at any ancient civilization, they've all used fantasy stories to train the young.

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

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

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

I think the story is the most ancient form of human entertainment.

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.

I like narrative storytelling as being part of a tradition, a folk tradition.

I grew up in Sierra Leone, in a small village where as a boy my imagination was sparked by the oral tradition of storytelling. At a very young age I learned the importance of telling stories - I saw that stories are the most potent way of seeing anything we encounter in our lives, and how we can deal with living.

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