Mythology Sayings and Quotes

Below you will find our collection of inspirational, wise, and humorous old mythology quotes, mythology sayings, and mythology proverbs, collected over the years from a variety of sources.

Myths have a way of bringing what is unconscious to the surface and putting a face on what we cannot see. Terry Tempest Williams
Mythology and religion are relevant and remarkable, as they each represent imaginative truths projections of human beings innermost desires intermixed with fragments of factual reality. Kilroy J. Oldster
Mythology can be defined as the sacred history of humankind. Gerald Hausman
Myths are public dreams, dreams are private myths. Joseph Campbell
Myth and nature are the two great garments of the world, with nature being the living green garment that covers the planet and myth being the multidimensional, many colored fabric that continually weaves human culture. Michael Meade
Without mythology, faith is impersonal and heartless. Amos Bronson Alcott
I guess darkness serves a purpose: to show us that there is redemption through chaos. I believe in that. I think that's the basis of Greek mythology. Brendan Fraser
Women are not in control of their bodies; nature is. Ancient mythology, with its sinister archetypes of vampire and Gorgon, is more accurate than feminism about the power and terror of female sexuality. Camille Paglia
We can keep from a child all knowledge of earlier myths, but we cannot take from him the need for mythology. Carl Jung
Nights through dreams tell the myths forgotten by the day. Carl Jung
Only a few individuals succeed in throwing off mythology in a time of certain intellectual supremacy--the mass never frees itself. Carl Jung
Philosophical mythology lies concealed in language, which breaks out again at every moment, no matter how cautious we may be. Friedrich Nietzsche
We must have a new mythology, but it must place itself at the service of ideas, it must become a mythology of reason. Mythology must become philosophical, so that the people may become rational, and philosophy must become mythological, so that philosophers may become sensible. If we do not give ideas a form that is aesthetic, i.e., mythological, they will hold no interest for people. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
To some extent, mythology is only the most ancient history and biography. So far from being false or fabulous in common sense, it contains only enduring and essential truth, the I and you, the here and there, the now and then, being omitted. Either time or rare wisdom writes it. Henry David Thoreau
The poet is he who can write some pure mythology today without the aid of posterity. Henry David Thoreau
Mythology is the crop which the Old World bore before its soil was exhausted. Henry David Thoreau
A myth or legend is simply not made up out of a vacuum. Nothing is--or can be. Somehow there is a kernel of truth behind it, however distorted that might be. Isaac Asimov
We cannot resort to simplistic or extreme solutions which substitute myths for common sense. Jimmy Carter
The depth of your mythology is the extent of your effectiveness. John C. Maxwell
I believe in everything until it's disproved. So I believe in fairies, the myths, dragons. It all exists, even if it's in your mind. Who's to say that dreams and nightmares aren't as real as the here and now? John Lennon
I think of mythology as the homeland of the muses, the inspirers of art, the inspirers of poetry. To see life as a poem and yourself participating in a poem is what the myth does for you. Joseph Campbell
The rise and fall of civilizations in the long, broad course of history can be seen to have been largely a function of the integrity and cogency of their supporting canons of myth; for not authority but aspiration is the motivator, builder, and transformer of civilization. Joseph Campbell
Clearly, mythology is no toy for children. Nor is it a matter of archaic, merely scholarly concern, of no moment to modern men of action. For its symbols (whether in the tangible form of images or in the abstract form of ideas) touch and release the deepest centers of motivation, moving literate and illiterate alike, moving mobs, moving civilizations. Joseph Campbell
The Bible is] a mass of fables and traditions, mere mythology. Mark Twain
Our technology forces us to live mythically, but we continue to think fragmentarily, and on single, separate planes. Marshall McLuhan
One may as well preach a respectable mythology as anything else. Mary Augusta Ward
The disinterested imaginative core of mythology is what develops into literature, science, philosophy. Religion is applied to mythology. Northrop Frye
Every human society possesses a mythology which is inherited, transmitted and diversified by literature. Northrop Frye
Literature is conscious mythology: as society develops, its mythical stories become structural principles of story-telling, its mythical concepts, sun-gods, and the like, become habits of metaphoric thought. In a fully mature literary tradition, the writer enters into a structure of traditional stories and images. Northrop Frye
The history of the genesis or the old mythology repeats itself in the experience of every child. He too is a demon or god thrown into a particular chaos, where he strives ever to lead things from disorder into order. Ralph Waldo Emerson