Mythical Symbolism Quotes

Human beings are what I think of as "biomythic" animals: we're controlled largely by the stories we tell. When we get the story wrong, we get out of harmony with the rest of the natural order.

Devils are depicted with bats' wings and good angels with birds' wings, not because anyone holds that moral deterioration would be likely to turn feathers into membrane, but because most men like birds better than bats.

[M]yths are not invented as stories are. Myths are inspired-they really are. They come from the same realm that dream comes from.

Myth is the nothing that is all.

We live in our myths, we only endure reality.

(I am) dealing not with the particular anecdote, but rather with the Spirit of Myth, which is generic to all myths at all times.

Sometimes you pick up on the myth and it's just an accident. I think it comes naturally out of people, and some people are aware of it.

The myth does not point to a fact; the myth points beyond facts to something that informs the fact

Great portrait photographers are great mythologists.

After all, I believe that legends and myths are largely made of 'truth', and indeed present aspects of it that can only be received in this mode; and long ago certain truths and modes of this kind were discovered and must always reappear.

Every myth is psychologically symbolic. Its narratives and images are to be read, therefore, not literally, but as metaphors.

There is no line between the 'real world' and 'world of myth and symbol.' Objects, sensations, hit with the impact of hallucination.

A myth is more powerful - and more lasting - than reality.

When we lose our myths we lose our place in the universe.

The theme of the diary is always the personal, but it does not mean only a personal story: it means a personal relationship to all things and people. The personal, if it is deep enough, becomes universal, mythical, symbolic; I never generalize, intellectualise. I see, I hear, I feel. These are my primitive elements of discovery. Music, dance, poetry and painting are the channels for emotion. It is through them that experience penetrates our bloodstream.

For myth is at the beginning of literature, and also at its end.

Besides, if there were no dragons of flesh and blood and fire, whence would come the idea for these stone carvings?

Myth is the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human manifestation.

Myths are the prototype for all stories. When we write a story on our own it can't help but link up with all sorts of myths. Myths are like a reservoir containing every story there is.

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.

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.

Myths are seldom simple, and never irresponsible.

I am interested in reconstructing symbols. It's about connecting with an older knowledge and trying to discover continuities in why we search for heaven.

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

I've always felt that the writing I responded to most - the novels and stories that compelled me, that felt like they described the world I live in, with all of its subjectivity, irrationality, and paradox, were those which made free use of myths and symbols, fantastic occurences, florid metaphors, linguistic experiments, etcetera - to depict the experiences of relatively 'realistic' characters - on the level of their emotions and psychology, rather than in terms of what kinds of lives they led or what kind of events they experience.