Archetypal Patterns Quotes

The myth holds us, therefore, not through its romantic flavor, not the remembrance of beauty of some bygone age, not through the possibilities of fantasy, but because it expresses to us something real and existing in ourselves, as it was to those who first stumbled upon the symbols to give them life.

You can say, 'Well, isn't it unfortunate that chaos is represented by the feminine' - well, it might be unfortunate, but it doesn't matter, because that is how it's represented. It's been represented like that forever. And there are reasons for it. You can't change it. It's not possible. This is underneath everything.

Story is about eternal, universal forms, not formulas.

The idea that a lot of sons marry their mothers subconsciously, which I have done in my own life, was interesting to explore.

I don't have a general archetypal platonic shadow, 'acting' concept about it.

At first I was glad for the help. My freshmen English class, "Mythology and Archetypal Experience," confounded me. I didn't understand why we couldn't just read books without forcing contorted interpretations on then

The connection between psychology, mythology, and literature is as important as the connection between psychology and biology and the hard sciences.

Archetypes are universal, and, in subtle or extravagant ways, interchangeable.

Myth was regarded as primary; it was concerned with what was thought to be timeless and constant in our existence. Myth looked back to the origins of life, to the foundations of culture, and to the deepest levels of the human mind. Myth was not concerned with practical matters, but with meaning. Unless we find some significance in our lives, we mortal men and women fall very easily into despair. The mythos of a society provided people with a context that made sense of their day-to-day lives; it directed their attention to the eternal and the universal.

Most religious stories and mythologies have some sort of similar root, some sort of global archetypes.

I feel all of the archetypes in Silicon Valley probably exist in some other form in other subcultures.

The great thing about fairy tales and myths is that they go beyond character. They're not about character. They're about more basic things. They're about basic fears or longings or desires or fantasies, and stuff like that.

And for me anyway, consciousness is three components: a personal component which for lack of a better word we can call the soul. A collective component which is more archetypal and a deeper level, and then a universal domain of consciousness.

Much as there are things about our own life stories that we can learn only from the systematic study of our dreams, there are things about the human condition that we can learn only from a systematic study of literature.

It is, then, by those shadows of the hoary Past and their fantastic silhouettes on the external screen of every religion and philosophy, that we can, by checking them as we go along, and comparing them, trace out finally the body that produced them.

I find increasingly that the more extreme are the things going on in your life, the more cultural reference points fail you. More mythical reference points actually help, and you realise that's what myths are for. It's for human beings to process their experience in extremis.