A Quote by Leonard Shlain

Admixing the inner space of dream, trance, and myth with the events of everyday existence characterized every belief system worldwide before the Greeks.....time meandered back and forth between reality and myth.

Leonard Shlain

Quote Topics

Back Back And Forth Before Belief Between Dream Events Every Everyday Existence Forth Greeks Inner Myth Reality Space System Time Trance Worldwide

Quote Author

Leonard Shlain
American - Inventor
August 28, 1937 - May 11, 2009

A myth is a fantasy, a preferred lie, a foundational story, a hypnotic trance, an identity game, a virtual reality, one that can be either inspirational or despairing. It is a story in which I cast myself; it is my inner cinema, the motion picture of my inner reality - one that moves all the time. No diagnosis can fix the myth, no cure can settle it, because our inner life is precisely what, in us, will not lie still.

Ginette Paris

Dream is personalized myth, myth is depersonalized dream; both myth and dream are symbolic in the same general way of the dynamics of the psyche. But in the dream the forms are quirked by the peculiar troubles of the dreamer, whereas in myth the problem and solutions shown are directly valid for all mankind.

Joseph Campbell

As a child I became a confirmed believer in the ancient gods simply because as between the reality of fact and the reality f myth, I chose myth...Myth is the truth of fact, not fact the truth of myth.

Kathleen Raine

A too often forgotten truth is that you can live through actual events of history and completely miss the underlying reality of what's going. What history misses, the myth clearly expresses. The myth in the hands of a genius give us a clear picture of the inner import of life itself.

Tom Harpur

I always have difficulty with the Greek tragic plays. I think the difficulty one has - which is a serious problem - is the question of belief. Do you believe in the myth that the play expresses? Do you believe in it as myth or as reality? With any play, you have to believe in it as reality. You can't act a myth.

Derek Walcott

I have always considered imaginative truth to be more profound, more loaded with significance, than every day reality... Everything we dream about, and by that I mean everything we desire, is true (the myth of Icarus came before aviation, and if Ader or Bleriot started flying it is because all men have dreamed of flight). There is nothing truer than myth... Reality does not have to be: it is simply what is.

Eugene Ionesco

Once a poet calls his myth a myth, he prevents the reader from treating it as a reality; we use the word "myth" only for stories we ourselves cannot believe.

Adam Kirsch

The myth is the public domain and the dream is the private myth. If your private myth, your dream, happens to coincide with that of the society, you are in good accord with your group. If it isn't, you've got a long adventure in the dark forest ahead of you.

Joseph Campbell

But myth is something else than an explanation of the world, of history, and of destiny. Myth expresses in terms of the world - that is, of the other world or the second world - the understanding that man has of himself in relation to the foundation and the limit of his existence. Hence to demythologize is to interpret myth, that is, to relate the objective representations of the myth to the self-understanding which is both shown and concealed in it.

Paul Ricoeur

We must remember that there is a great difference between a myth and a miracle. A myth is the idealization of a fact. A miracle is the counterfeit of a fact. There is the same difference between a myth and a miracle that there is between fiction and falsehood -- between poetry and perjury. Miracles belong to the far past and the far future. The little line of sand, called the present, between the seas, belongs to common sense to the natural.

Robert Green Ingersoll

There is a sad myth going around today - the myth of neutrality. According to this myth, the secular world gives every point of view an equal chance to be heard. And it works fairly well - unless you are a Christian.

Francis Schaeffer

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.

C. S. Lewis

There is nothing truer than myth: history, in its attempt to realize myth, distorts it, stops halfway; when history claims to have succeeded, this is nothing but humbug and mystification. Everything we dream is realizable. Reality does not have to be: it is simply what it is.

Eugene Ionesco

The myth is a surviving fragment of the psychic life of the infancy of the race whilst the dream is the myth of the individual.