Best 607 quotes in «mythology quotes» category

Humor is the touchstone of the truly mythological as distinct from the more literal-minded and sentimental theological mood.

I always thought they were fabulous monsters!" said the Unicorn. "Is it alive?" "It can talk," said Haigha, solemnly. The Unicorn looked dreamily at Alice, and said, "Talk, child." Alice could not help her lips curling up into a smile as she began: "Do you know, I always thought Unicorns were fabulous monsters, too! I never saw one alive before!" "Well, now that we have seen each other," said the Unicorn, "if you'll believe in me, I'll believe in you. Is that a bargain?

I am able to separate the mythological aspects of my religion from the practical ones. Jesus, his sacrifice, the Gospels? Those are true to me. Angels, demons, burning bushes, Revelations? Primitive people trying to express the ineffable. I don’t need to be a biblical literalist to love my God.

I am caught. You caught me. Not the other way around. From the very first day. And from the very first day, I would have done anything for you—except let you go. I couldn’t. Not when deep down, I knew we were meant to be like this. To love like this.

I am death; I am this blood, these ravaged lands, and this wanton destruction. – Panchali Draupadi

I am gonna shock the crowd, you are just gonna wow them.

I ate mythology & dreamt' - Yusef Komunyakaa (Blackberries)

I asked "What do you even do with a chimera?" "What wouldn't you do with a chimera?" Jeff asked. "They're like the Swiss Army knife of animals.

I believe she is Selene, goddess of the moon." "She looks so content." "You sound surprised." "Well," Callie said tentatively, "Selene is not the happiest of stories. After all, she is doomed to love a mortal in eternal sleep." St. John turned at her words, obviously impressed. "Her own fault. She should have known better than to ask favors of Zeus. That particular course of action never ends well." "A truth of which Selene was likely acutely aware upon receiving her favor. I assume that this statue depicts a happy Selene before Zeus meddled." "You forget," St. John said, a teasing gleam in his eye, "she and Endymion did have twenty children despite his somnolence, so she couldn't have been so very unhappy with her situation." "With due respect, my lord," Callie said, "bearing and raising twenty children alone does not sound like the happiest of circumstances. I hardly think she would appear so very rested were this a statue depicting her maternal bliss.

…I bet Echo that she couldn't repeat the following line ten times fast:   Cupid's Academy counts kissing cousins as completed conquests cause his classes cunningly conspire unconscious couples to copulate and canoodle copiously.

I bet if I were pharaoh, I’d have had my tomb planned and designed by the time I was ten. I've always wanted to be five steps ahead of where I am. And my mind does it right now: I picture the king on his deathbed, and Ay delivers the awful news to me, but I'm the best embalmer in Thebes thanks to Anubis, so I'm alone in a dark room, and I cut open his soft chest, and take out a heart filled with dreams and love and sadness.

I can’t get enough of you,” he said against her neck. “When I walk away from you I feel like I’ve cut myself off from breathing.

I caught his hand. “What do you want me to do?” Leaning down, he kissed the pulse beating on my neck just above the damaged skin. “Tomorrow, I need you to die.

I’d gone from living alone in New York as a lowly shoe clerk to becoming a shieldmaiden with a family to come home to. It didn’t get much better than that.

I did not do it for you, sire." Gawain was deadly serious now. "Death comes to us and all mortals. I shall still lose you one day. But Logres! The only perfection under heaven would fall if I could not save you.

I don’t know why anyone thinks looking at the stars is so romantic,” he said. “Have they ever read Greek mythology? It’s all the same story—God sees mortal, God desires mortal, mortal suffers gruesome fate and is rewarded with an eternity of pain in the cosmos.” He shrugged. “You could always make up your own stories.” But she was already shaking her head. “No. Those stories are written in stardust millions of years old. I don’t think I get to change them.” “Then I’m thankful for light pollution,” he said.

I don't know about you, the world is here to be mythologized. It has, therefore, no other end. Transforming into myth, to be a myth! That's what we call eternity.

I dropped my dress to the floor and sat on the sofa with renewed determination. This man was going to have sex with me whether he liked it or not.

I do tasks for the gods, usually things like tracking down rare items or taking someone safely to a destination." D'Molay the Freeman Tracker

I dropped my bag to the floor and the sound echoed throughout the house. No one shouted, "who's home?" or "Cassie? Is that you?". Instead the house gobbled up the sound as if it didn't know when the next taste of noise would come. Then again, the house hadn't experienced Olivia yet.

I fear no hell, just as I expect no heaven. Nabokov summed up a nonbeliever’s view of the cosmos, and our place in it, thus: “The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.” The 19th-century Scottish historian Thomas Carlyle put it slightly differently: “One life. A little gleam of Time between two Eternities.” Though I have many memories to cherish, I value the present, my time on earth, those around me now. I miss those who have departed, and recognize, painful as it is, that I will never be reunited with them. There is the here and now – no more. But certainly no less. Being an adult means, as Orwell put it, having the “power of facing unpleasant facts.” True adulthood begins with doing just that, with renouncing comforting fables. There is something liberating in recognizing ourselves as mammals with some fourscore years (if we’re lucky) to make the most of on this earth. There is also something intrinsically courageous about being an atheist. Atheists confront death without mythology or sugarcoating. That takes courage.

I feared my soul was dying, being replaced by the monster I would become.

If I wasn't discovering something, if I wasn't studying, well then, what was I doing? I know I wouldn’t be happy unless I made a difference. So what was the happiness of a moment worth against the happiness of my life?" I let out a breathy laugh and squeeze his hand. "I guess it doesn't matter now.” I stare out over camp, but a glassy sadness blurs my vision. “Have you ever wanted something so much that everything else in the world seemed so small?" He tilts his head toward me, narrowing his eyes. "I'm beginning to.

If I were to lock you up in a dungeon, I guarantee you would not be bored.

If she could explore and heal his injuries with her fingers, it would be another type of magic, her skin making contact with his. Putting her mind to it, Love would become familiar with his body. She would know him from top to bottom, from beginning to end. Touching this boy would be the death, and life, of her.

If professional religious leaders cannot instruct us in mythological lore, our artists and creative writers can perhaps step into this priestly role and bring fresh insight to our lost and damaged role.

If there's one thing I've learned in my eighteen life-cycles, it's that the most special moments--the most magical pockets of out existence--are always going to be the parts of us that the rest of the world won't understand.

If the students were taught about shuttle flights, plate tectonics and submarine volcanoes, they were also immersed in the traditional myths of their culture—the ancient story, for example, of how the island of Pohnpei had been built under the direction of a mystical octopus, Lidakika. (I was fascinated by this, for it was the only cephalopod creation myth I had ever heard.

I had the impulse to look over my shoulder, to make sure he was not striding across the sky already, his gilded arrow pointed at my heart. But there was something in me that was sick of fear and awe, of gazing at the heavens and wondering what someone would allow me. 'Come in,' I said, and led him through my door.

IGNORANCE is without gaining Knowledge & Knowledge is gained without IGNORANCE

I had to break up with Medusa. I just got sick of buying mice for her hair. I should have ended it sooner, but you try looking into those eyes.

I happen to know that history is nothing but a spin and metaphor, which is what all yarns are made up of, when you strip them down to the underlay. And what makes a hit or a myth, of course, is how that story is told, and by whom.

I have done it," she says. At first I do not understand. But then I see the tomb, and the marks she has made on the stone. A C H I L L E S, it reads. And beside it, P A T R O C L U S. "Go," she says. "He waits for you." In the darkness, two shadows, reaching through the hopeless, heavy dusk. Their hands meet, and light spills in a flood like a hundred golden urns pouring out of the sun.

I have fled from the wilderness fasting, with woe and unflagging travail, I have sought for the light on the mountain, and skirted the devilish dale. I have laid my mouth in the dust, and begged the Might to be kind, I have come to the feast, and I famish. Now grant me the Holy Grail.

I had to find Mr. Brentwood. And I had to save him. Zeus, Inc. had saved the world 50 years ago when we had depleted our energy resources. The very same Zeus, Inc. that now powered a majority of the known world. And that power had come from the man himself. Without him? We would all be plunged into total darkness, knocked back to the literal dark ages. Chaos could and probably would ensue.

I love you more than too much.

I have placed my faith in humanity, but faith in the universal becomes meaningless without faith in the individual. – Panchali Draupadi

I just discovered I’m completely unprepared to seduce you.” “I swear to you, Snoopy has never looked sexier.

I liked myths. They weren't adult stories and they weren't children's stories. They were better than that. They just were.

I looked at Vicki. My beautiful Vicki. My dream. My love. My life.

Imagine a perfect world

I know that you are wise. When you hear a true story, there is a part of you that responds to it regardless of art, regardless of evidence…You believe that the story is true, because you responded to it from that sense of truth deep within you. But that sense of truth does not respond to a story's factuality...[rather] to a story's causality - whether it faithfully shows the way the universe functions.

I learned the Norse gods came with their own doomsday: Ragnarok, the twilight of the gods, the end of it all. The gods were going to battle the frost giants, and they were all going to die. Had Ragnarok happened yet? Was it still to happen? I did not know then. I am not certain now.

I mean,” he said, “that by your own showing, the greatest threat to heaven comes from within the ranks of the angels themselves. Before you can prove to me that heroes can defeat villains with nothing but the purest chivalric ideals, you must convince me that heroes do exist, and that villains are not a fanciful tale for children. You must tell me, sir, if you dare, that you are incorruptible, and that your colleagues and commanders are as pure as you.

In a segment of the Sermon on the Mount, appearing in Matthew 5, Jesus is reported to have set six new teachings of his against six old Jewish teachings. The latter are introduced by such words as 'You have heard that it was said by them of old time' and the former by 'But I say unto you.' Since both the teachings of old time and Jesus' new teachings are predicated on the same profoundly mistaken views of human nature and of the world in general, it is unimportant for us here today to compare and contrast these teachings or to determine which is better or worse in some way or other. The point is that whether better or worse, in this way or that, both are lodged in an egregiously mistaken mythology -- but in a mythology of enormous importance for us, because it is one of the wellsprings of Western culture.

I’m… “ I stop, at a loss. Griffin lifts his eyebrows. “Inarticulate at the moment?” Scowling, I thwack him in the chest. “Overwrought?” he supplies, his mouth quirking up. I thwack him again. “Highly emotional?” Thwack. Thwack. “Apparently weak, because none of that hurt at all.

Impari lentamente, mio amato, ma impari. E ciò che si impara lentamente scende più nel profondo. Voi uomini e i vostri Dei! Vi beffate della Madre per la sua lentezza da lumaca, perché crea ciecamente al buio. Tuttavia quando create senza di Lei, in fretta e alla luce, create davvero ciecamente, dando forma, magari, alla morte di un mondo! Ebbene, avvelenate il mare e il cielo, l'aria che respirate, e persino la dolce pelle bruna del suo seno, che Essa vi ha sempre permesso di lacerare per darvi le messi. Uccidete e uccidete finché non rimane più niente se non ossa nude su una terra squallida e contaminata. La Madre è potente; Essa ha molti corpi, e il vostro mondo è solo uno di quelli. Nella Sua potenza Essa può tuttavia guarire le vostre ferite e far rifiorire la terra, sì: allevare voi uomini, anche se deve partorire di nuovo tutta la vostra razza. Perché una buona madre è paziente; sa che un bambino inciampa più volte prima d'imparare a camminare...

I'm not a gift for you to present to Sirius...I want to ride in with my head held high, as an equal to my husband....[Sirius] wanted a woman the gods said would make him great. That woman isn't going to be hauled about like a crate of potatoes.

in America we have people from all kinds of backgrounds, all in a cluster, together, and consequently law has become very important in this country. Lawyers and law are what hold us together. There is no ethos.

Indigenous religious traditions around the world continue to provide an ancient yet living vision of nature as sacred, requiring human respect and entailing human responsibilities. Anymals are understood to be “people” living in community as humans live in community—all of whom are part of a larger community of living beings. Indigenous religious traditions teach people that we owe respect, responsibility, and compassion to our nonhuman kin, and remember a time of great peace, before predation began. Most indigenous peoples believe that all beings are endowed with souls. Anymals are generally thought to hold exceptional abilities and remarkable powers.