Cultural Mythology Quotes

A society manufactures the heroes it requires.

In the beginning was the myth. God, in his search for self-expression, invested the souls of Hindus, Greeks, and Germans with poetic shapes and continues to invest each child's soul with poetry every day.

Storytelling is our oldest form of remembering the promises we have made to one another and to our various gods, and the promises given in return; it is a way of recording our human emotions and desires and taboos.

I think that in Sweden and a lot of European countries, there's this whole mythology of the wounded artist: that you can't really do any great art unless you're suffering.

Americans like to believe we can overcome all obstacles and always triumph in the end, but that's not real life and a steady diet of stories like that will give you a pretty unhealthy view of reality.

I'm always wondering, if Bigfoot's not real, then why does this creature show up in all these different cultures? I'm always fascinated by that kind of stuff.

Every country must have its own devil. Welshland its own, and France its own. Our German devil will be a good wind-pipe, and must be called drinking, being so thirsty and hell-like that no guzzling of wine and beer, however large, will cool it off, and I fear that such will ever remain Germany's plague, until the day of judgment.

The legend goes that St. Patrick drove the snakes out of Ireland. I was thinking... that must be hard to put all the tiny seatbelts on all the snakes.

Just as nature abhors a vacuum, so a culture will find some kind of grand narrative of itself to feed upon, even a poisonous one.

The reigning mythology of the Northwest is obviously nature, and the reigning mythology of the Northeast corridor is culture.

France is obsessed with power. Our mythology of power bears the imprint of nostalgia and obsolescence.

America creates myths by focusing a lot of energy on its history and using it - - not always, but sometimes - for constructive purposes.

If we come from good families where we have been supported well, there is a disillusionment we have to undergo in terms of the culture's values. We have to get beyond our cultural mythology to find out who we are.

When a culture is not mythologically instructed, not instructed in story that gives us a call, then we start looking for quasi-stories, little toxic stories that keep our selves alerted and spared until we find another story.

What of the Exodus? That too, is a wonderful story, but from the viewpoint of an historian, it is - to use a word scholars love - problematic. Let's say there are doubts, to say the least, among many scholars, as to whether the Exodus actually occurred. That's a historical issue.

God is a complex of ideas formed by the tribe, the nation, and humanity, which awake and organize social feelings and aim to link the individual to society and to bridle the zoological individualism.

What is becoming more interesting than the myths themselves has been the study of how the myths were constructed from sparse or unpromising facts indeed, sometimes from no facts in a kind of mute conspiracy of longing, very rarely under anybody's conscious control.

The Matrix itself is not some external evil, but rather an outcome of our own error, our karmic payoff of past actions. Not merely illusion, it is an allusion to a founding myth of our culture.

In Russia, they have Rusalkis, and they have Selkies in Scotland, and in Fiji, you have a special mention of it. The first earliest mermaid mentioned in history books was Atargartis in Assyria, a thousand B.C... In Africa, you have Mami Wata.

The white man has created a devil, to bring chaos upon this earth.

I don't buy the whole mythology of the sixties. I think I'm an intergenerational person.

Noah was this sort of patron saint in my life. When I finished Pi and I started to think about what was next, I was like, "Wow, it's interesting that no one has done a film of one of the greatest stories ever told." Even if you're not a Jew, a Muslim, or a Christian, you likely have a flood story in your culture.

Well, it had to be about the stories and the people who live under the volcano, what kind of new gods do they create? What sort of demons? And of course North Korea falls clearly into this category since the socialist revolution at the end of the Second World War. Somehow they adopted the myth of the power and dynamics of their volcano.

I meet a number of people as a writer of fiction who say "Oh, I don't read much fiction," as if the history of the United States, just as an example, isn't an exercise in storytelling and myth-making.

This country has such little sense of itself sometimes, I'm astonished. America is one of the biggest myth-making countries, whether we're talking about how many books are published, how many movies we make. But the greatest myth of all is what America is.