94 Mythology Quotes

A man contains all that is needed to make up a tree; likewise, a tree contains all that is needed to make up a man. Thus, finally, all things meet in all things, but we need a Prometheus to distill it.

Are we not madder than those first inhabitants of the plain of Sennar? We know that the distance separating the earth from the sky is infinite, and yet we do not stop building our tower.

Love, who is most beautiful among the immortal gods, the melter of limbs, overwhelms in their hearts the intelligence and wise counsel of all gods and all men.

Gifts, believe me, captivate both men and Gods, Jupiter himself was won over and appeased by gifts.

Christianity is the strangest religion ever set up, for it committed a murder upon Jesus in order to redeem mankind from the sin of eating an apple.

The Land of Faery, Where nobody gets old and godly and grave, Where nobody gets old and crafty and wise, Where nobody gets old and bitter of tongue.

I believe in one secret and ineffable LORD; and in one Star in the Company of Stars of whose fire we are created, and to which we shall return; and in one Father of Life, Mystery of Mystery, in His name CHAOS, the sole viceregent of the Sun upon the Earth; and in one Air the nourisher of all that breathes. And I believe in one Earth, the Mother of us all, and in one Womb wherein all men are begotten, and wherein they shall rest, Mystery of Mystery, in Her name BABALON.

Queen and huntress, chaste and fair, Now the sun is laid to sleep, Seated in thy silver chair, State in wonted manner keep: Hesperus entreats thy light, Goddess, excellently bright.

They worshipped, so they said, the Great Old Ones who lived ages before there were any men, and who came to the young world out of the sky. Those Old Ones were gone now, inside the earth and under the sea; but their dead bodies had told their secrets in dreams to the first men, who formed a cult which had never died. This was that cult, and the prisoners said it had always existed and always would exist, hidden in distant wastes and dark places all over the world until the time when the great priest Cthulhu, from his dark house in the mighty city of R'lyeh under the waters, should rise and bring the earth again beneath his sway. Some day he would call, when the stars were ready, and the secret cult would always be waiting to liberate him.

'To try to write a grand cosmical drama leads necessarily to myth. To try to let knowledge substitute ignorance in increasingly larger regions of space and time is science.'

It was just as the 1914 War burst on me that I made the discovery that 'legends' depend on the language to which they belong; but a living language depends equally on the 'legends' which it conveys by tradition. ... Volapuk, Esperanto, Ido, Novial, &c &c are dead, far deader than ancient unused languages, because their authors never invented any Esperanto legends...

Ere Babylon was dust, The Magus Zoroaster, my dead child, Met his own image walking in the garden. That apparition, sole of men, he saw.

Let the credulous and the vulgar continue to believe that all mental woes can be cured by a daily application of old Greek myths to their private parts.

The old seraph, parcel-gilded, among violets Inhaled the appointed odor, while the doves Rose up like phantoms from chronologies.

It seems to me that nothing would be more foolish than to reestablish the worship of Wotan. Our old mythology had ceased to be viable when Christianity implanted itself. Nothing dies unless it is moribund. At that period the ancient world was divided between the systems of philosophy and the worship of idols. It is not desirable that the whole of humanity should be stultified- and the only way of getting rid of Christianity is to allow it to die little by little.

I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one's burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

I am the blue-lidded daughter of Sunset; I am the naked brilliance of the voluptuous night-sky.

Night, sable goddess! from her ebon throne, In rayless majesty, now stretches forth Her leaden scepter o'er a slumbering world.

The possibilities of the art of combination are not infinite, but they tend to be frightful. The Greeks engendered the chimera, a monster with heads of the lion, the dragon and the goat; the theologians of the second century, the Trinity, in which the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost are inextricably tied; the Chinese zoologists, the ti-yiang, a vermilion supernatural bird, endowed with six feet and four wings, but without a face or eyes; the geometers of the nineteenth century, the hypercube, a figure with four dimensions, which encloses an infinite number of cubes and has as its faces eight cubes and twenty-four squares. Hollywood has just enriched this vain museum of horrors: by means of an artistic malignity called dubbing, it proposes monsters that combine the illustrious features of Greta Garbo with the voice of Aldonza Lorenzo.

[The] chief [of the gods of Cimmeria] is Crom. He dwells on a great mountain. What use to call on him? Little he cares if men live or die. Better to be silent than to call his attention to you; he will send you dooms, not fortune! He is grim and loveless, but at birth he breathes power to strive and slay into a man's soul. What else shall men ask of the gods? ... There is no hope here or hereafter in the cult of my people. In this world men struggle and suffer vainly, finding pleasure only in the bright madness of battle; dying, their souls enter a gray misty realm of clouds and icy winds, to wander cheerlessly throughout eternity.

The idea that any one of our religions represents the infallible word of the One True God requires an encyclopedic ignorance of history, mythology, and art even to be entertained.... Whatever their imagined source, the doctrines of modern religions are no more tenable than those which, for lack of adherents, were cast upon the scrap heap of mythology millennia ago.

Tequila, scorpion honey, harsh dew of the doglands, essence of Aztec, crema de cacti; tequila, oily and thermal like the sun in solution; tequila, liquid geometry of passion; Tequila, the buzzard god who copulates in midair with the ascending souls of dying virgins; tequila, firebug in the house of good taste; O tequila, savage water of sorcery, what confusion and mischief your sly, rebellious drops do generate!'

Fiery the Angels rose, & as they rose deep thunder roll'd Around their shores: indignant burning with the fires of Orc

You have already grasped that Sisyphus is the absurd hero. He is, as much through his passions as through his torture. His scorn of the gods, his hatred of death, and his passion for life won him that unspeakable penalty in which the whole being is exerted toward accomplishing nothing. This is the price that must be paid for the passions of this earth. Nothing is told us about Sisyphus in the underworld. Myths are made for the imagination to breathe life into them.

Know, oh prince, that between the years when the oceans drank Atlantis and the gleaming cities, and the years of the rise of the Sons of Aryas, there was an Age undreamed of, when shining kingdoms lay spread across the world like blue mantles beneath the stars - Nemedia, Ophir, Brythunia, Hyperborea, Zamora with its dark-haired women and towers of spider-haunted mystery, Zingara with its chivalry, Koth that bordered on the pastoral lands of Shem, Stygia with its shadow-guarded tombs, Hyrkania whose riders wore steel and silk and gold. But the proudest kingdom of the world was Aquilonia, reigning supreme in the dreaming west. Hither came Conan, the Cimmerian, black-haired, sullen-eyed, sword in hand, a thief, a reaver, a slayer, with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth, to tread the jeweled thrones of the Earth under his sandalled feet

Suppose the neutral angels were able to talk to Yahweh and Lucifer- God and Satan, to use their popular titles- into settling out of court. What would be the terms of the compromise? Specifically, how would they divide the assets of their earthly kingdom? Would God be satisfied to take loaves and fishes and itty-bitty thimbles of Communion wine, while allowing Satan to have the redeye Gravy, eighteen ounce New York steak, and buckets of chilled champagne? Would God really accept twice-a-month lovemaking for procreative purposes and give Satan the all-night, no-holds-barred, nasty 'can't-get-enough-of-you' hot-as-hell fucks?

Opinions differ as to the reasons why he became the futile laborer of the underworld. To begin with, he is accused of a certain levity in regard to the gods. He stole their secrets.

Heraclitus, the discoverer of the constant change of things, nevertheless set a limit to this perpetual process. This limit was symbolized by Nemesis, the goddess of moderation and the implacable enemy of the immoderate.

The great brand Made lightnings in the splendour of the moon, And flashing round and round, and whirl'd in an arch, Shot like a streamer of the northern morn, Seen where the moving isles of winter shock By night, with noises of the northern sea. So flash'd and fell the brand Excalibur.

on the infamous ice cream maker: It's like the Sirens in Greek mythology. You're lured to the machine, and then destroyed by the machine.

Quelle est cette ile triste et noire? - C'est Cythere, Nous dit-on, un pays fameux dans les chansons Eldorado banal de tous les vieux garcons. Regardez, apres tout, c'est une pauvre terre.

Below the highest sphere four Regents sit Who rule our world, and under them are zones Nearer, but high, where saintliest spirits dead Wait thrice ten thousand years, then live again; And on Lord Buddha, waiting in that sky, Came for our sakes the five sure signs of birth So that the Devas knew the signs, and said 'Buddha will go again to help the World.' 'Yea!' spake He, 'now I go to help the World. This last of many times; for birth and death End hence for me and those who learn my Law. I will go down among the Sakyas, Under the southward snows of Himalay, Where pious people live and a just King.'

What was he doing, the great god Pan, Down in the reeds by the river? Spreading ruin and scattering ban, Splashing and paddling with hoofs of a goat, And breaking the golden lilies afloat With the dragon-fly on the river.

Angels, shit. What about goblins? What about goblins, huh? Doesn't anybody believe in goblins? You never hear about them except on Halloween, and it's always negative shit too, you know. And zombies. Where the fuck are all the zombies? That's the trouble with zombies, they're unreliable. I say if you're gonna buy the angel shit, you might go with the zombie package as well.

You and me on the bobbing knee. Didn't we cry at that old mythology he'd read! I will come home again, but not until The sun and the moon meet on yon hill.

Her subjects come tripping from library shelves, television and cinema screens and musty books of fairy tales, the stuff that dreams are made of. She spins tunes that haunt, twist and turn the mind, triggering long forgotten moods. Listening intently to her albums is an experience akin to having a lucid and feverish dream. Jungian symbols of youth, innocence, spiritual escape and the dark, feminine realm abound. Ghosts haunt the black vinyl grooves... But it's not all brooding intensity. There are jokes, too...

She chose the Sistrum for her emblem, and had it carefully drawn with a view to its being engraved on a gem. And I know not how many verses and legends came recommended to her by this symbolism. Her dreams, of course, partook of this symmetry. The same dream returns to her periodically, annually, and punctual to its night. One dream she marks in her journal as repeated for the fourth time: 'In C., I at last distinctly recognized the figure of the early vision, whom I found after I had left A., who led me, on the bridge, towards the city, glittering in sunset, but, midway, the bridge went under water. I have often seen in her face that it was she, but refused to believe it.'

With silent strides Odysseus then shot back the bolt, passed lightly through the courtyard and sped down the street. Some saw him take the graveyard's zigzag mountain path, some saw him leap on rocks that edged the savage shore, some visionaries saw him in the dead of night swimming and talking secretly with the sea-demons, but only a small boy saw him in a lonely dream sit crouched and weeping by the dark sea's foaming edge.

The worm stood straight on God's blood-splattered threshold then and beat his drum, beat it again, and raised his throat: 'You've matched all well on earth, wine, women, bread, and song, but why, you Murderer, must you slay our children? Why?' God foamed with rage and raised his sword to pierce that throat, but his old copper sword, my lads, stuck at the bone. Then from his belt the worm drew his black-hilted sword, rushed up and slew that old decrepit god in heaven! And now, my gallant lads - I don't know when or how - that worm's god-slaying sword has fallen into my hands; I swear that from its topmost iron tip the blood still drips!

Then the omnipotent Father with his thunder made Olympus tremble, and from Ossa hurled Pelion.

In the winter season, For seven days of calm, Alcyone Broods over her nest on the surface of the waters While the sea-waves are quiet. Through this time Aeolus keeps his winds at home, and ocean Is smooth for his descendants' sake.

It's the standard contract. Gives you seven wishes in accordance with the mystic rules of life. Seven Days of the Week, Seven Deadly Sins, Seven Seas, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers...

The gods are not magicians who transform themselves; neither do they deceive mankind in any way.

Mythology is wondrous, a balm for the soul. But its problems cannot be ignored. At worst, it buys inspiration at the price of physical impossibility [:]. At best, it purveys the same myopic view of history that made this most fascinating subject so boring and misleading in grade school as a sequential take of monarchs and battles.

Maxime tamen curavit notitiam historiae fabularis usque ad ineptias atque derisum; nam et grammaticos, quod genus hominum praecipue, ut diximus, appetebat, eius modi fere quaestionibus experiebatur: 'Quae mater Hecubae, quod Achilli nomen inter virgines fuisset, quid Sirenes cantare sint solitae.'

The sky split apart in malice Stars rattled like pans on a shelf Crow shat on Buckingham Palace God pissed Himself.

DW is based on a slew of old myths, which reach their most 'refined' form in Hindu mythology, which in turn of course derived from the original Star Trek episode 'Planet of Wobbly Rocks where the Security Guard Got Shot'.

It couldn't have been Pan's output alone because Alobar's testicles were as flat and juiceless as trampled grapes.

The first idea was not our own. Adam In Eden was the father of Descartes And eve made air the mirror of herself, Of her sons and of her daughters.

O hurry where by water among the trees The delicate-stepping stag and his lady sigh, When they have but looked upon their images-- Would none had ever loved but you and I! Or have you heard that sliding silver-shoed Pale silver-proud queen-woman of the sky, When the sun looked out of his golden hood?-- O that none ever loved but you and I! O hurry to the ragged wood, for there I will drive all those lovers out and cry-- O my share of the world, O yellow hair! No one has ever loved but you and I.

I'm twenty-seven, she's seventeen. 'Blind Cupid, lame Cupid, both blind and lame Cupid said, Love this girl,'

Let's reinvent the gods, all the myths of the ages Celebrate symbols from deep elder forests

Out at the horizon, out near the burnished edge of the world, who are these visitors standing... these robed figures - perhaps, at this distance, hundreds of miles tall - their faces, serene, unattached, like the Buddha's, bending over the sea, impassive, indeed, as the Angel that stood over Lubeck during the Palm Sunday raid, come that day neither to destroy nor to protect, but to bear witness to a game of seduction... What have the watchmen of the world's edge come tonight to look for? Deepening on now, monumental beings stoical, on toward slag, toward ash the colour the night will stabilize at, tonight... what is there grandiose enough to witness?

I have to tell your listeners that Frosty the Snowman is the most frightening phenomenon of the extra dimension. You can talk about the Abominable Snowman, you can talk about UFOs, all of these things, but when Frosty looks at you with those big coal eyes of his, and he goes to work at you with that carrot nose? No sir-- no sir, no sir, no sir.

I'm Ted Bell. And you go straight to the place where the Devil lives and has sex and makes little Devils.

(referring to Cupids) The small babies that can hurt you? I don't know, I'm not familiar.

And the cold marble leapt to life a god.

By the Beard of Zeus.

By the hammer of Thor!

Science can destroy religion by ignoring it as well as by disproving its tenets. No one ever demonstrated, so far as I am aware, the non-existence of Zeus or Thor - but they have few followers now.

'Cause the Roman Gods up to that point were crap, you know... Jeff, the god of biscuits... and Simon, the god of hair-dos.

There's 200,000 gods in Hinduism... and they've got gods like Shiva, the God of Creation and Destruction. Which is a good god to be, 'cause you can go *WHOOM* (creates thing) 'What do you think? Do you like that? You don't like that?' *WHOOM* (destroys thing) If you're just the God of Creation, you're going *WHOOM* 'Do you like that? You don't? All right, I'll put it in the garage... shit, I haven't got a garage! *WHOOM* (creates garage)

From the blood of Medusa Pegasus sprang. His hoof of heaven Like melody rang.

Le mythe de Promethee signifie que toute la tristesse du monde a son siege dans le foie. Mais qui oserait reconnaitre une verite si humble?

Because of the way that myth takes it for granted that miracles are always happening, the waking life of a mythically inspired people - the ancient Greeks, for instance - more closely resembles a dream than it does the waking world of a scientifically disenchanted thinker.

I am not sure but I should betake myself in extremities to the liberal divinities of Greece, rather than to my country's God. Jehovah, though with us he has acquired new attributes, is more absolute and unapproachable, but hardly more divine, than Jove. He is not so much of a gentleman, not so gracious and catholic, he does not exert so intimate and genial an influence on nature, as many a god of the Greeks.

The Grecian are youthful and erring and fallen gods, with the vices of men, but in many important respects essentially of the divine race. In my Pantheon, Pan still reigns in his pristine glory, with his ruddy face, his flowing beard, and his shaggy body, his pipe and his crook, his nymph Echo, and his chosen daughter Iambe; for the great god Pan is not dead, as was rumored. No god ever dies. Perhaps of all the gods of New England and of ancient Greece, I am most constant at his shrine.

Das Ewig-Weibliche zieht uns hinan.

If you will take the trouble to consult your dictionary, you will find that demons may be either good or bad, like any other class of beings. Originally all demons were good, yet of late years people have come to consider all demons evil. I do not know why. Should you read Hesiod you will find he says: 'Soon was a world of holy demons made, Aerial spirits, by great Jove designed To be on earth the guardians of mankind.' ' 'But Jove was himself a myth,' objected Rob, who had been studying mythology. The Demon shrugged his shoulders. 'Then take the words of Mr. Shakespeare, to whom you all defer,' he replied. 'Do you not remember that he says: 'Thy demon (that's thy spirit which keeps thee) is Noble, courageous, high, unmatchable.' ' 'Oh, if Shakespeare says it, that's all right,' answered the boy.'

Men rarely (if ever) manage to dream up a god superior to themselves. Most gods have the manners and morals of a spoiled child.

The drive toward the formation of metaphors is the fundamental human drive, which one cannot for a single instant dispense with in thought, for one would thereby dispense with man himself. This drive is not truly vanquished and scarcely subdued by the fact that a regular and rigid new world is constructed as its prison from its own ephemeral products, the concepts. It seeks a new realm and another channel for its activity, and it finds this in myth and in art generally. This drive continually confuses the conceptual categories and cells by bringing forward new transferences, metaphors, and metonymies. It continually manifests an ardent desire to refashion the world which presents itself to waking man, so that it will be as colorful, irregular, lacking in results and coherence, charming, and eternally new as the world of dreams. Indeed, it is only by means of the rigid and regular web of concepts that the waking man clearly sees that he is awake; and it is precisely because of this that he sometimes thinks that he must be dreaming when this web of concepts is torn by art.

Ihre (Predigern des Todes) Weisheit lautet: 'ein Thor, der leben bleibt, aber so sehr sind wir Thoren! Und das eben ist das Thorichtste am Leben!' -

To some extent, mythology is only the most ancient history and biography. So far from being false or fabulous in the 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. Before printing was discovered, a century was equal to a thousand years. The poet is he who can write some pure mythology to-day without the aid of posterity

Ka is a wheel.