A Quote by Robert Graves

Mythology is the study of whatever religious or heroic legends are so foreign to a student's experience that he cannot believe them to be true. . . . Myth has two main functions. The first is to answer the sort of awkward questions that children ask, such as: 'Who made the world? How will it end? Who was the first man? Where do souls go after death?'. . . . The second function of myth is to justify an existing social system and account for traditional rites and customs.

Robert Graves

Quote Topics

Account After After Death Answer Ask Awkward Be True Believe Cannot Children Customs Death End Existing Experience First Foreign Function Functions Go Heroic How Justify Legends Made Main Man Myth Mythology Questions Religious Rites Second Social Social System Sort Souls Student Study System Them Traditional True Two Whatever Will World

Quote Author

Robert Graves
Irish - Novelist
July 24, 1895 - December 7, 1985

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

Through the ages, man's main concern was life after death. Today, for the first time, we find we must ask questions about whether there will be life before death.

Albert Szent-Gyorgyi

There are two questions a man must ask himself: The first is 'Where am I going?' and the second is 'Who will go with me?' If you ever get these questions in the wrong order you are in trouble.

Sam Keen

America is the world's living myth. There's no sense of wrong when you kill an American or blame America for some local disaster. This is our function, to be character types, to embody recurring themes that people can use to comfort themselves, justify themselves and so on. We're here to accommodate. Whatever people need, we provide. A myth is a useful thing.

Don DeLillo

The fairy tale, which to this day is the first tutor of children because it was once the first tutor of mankind, secretly lives on in the story. The first true storyteller is, and will continue to be, the teller of fairy tales. Whenever good counsel was at a premium, the fairy tale had it, and where the need was greatest, its aid was nearest. This need was created by myth. The fairy tale tells us of the earliest arrangements that mankind made to shake off the nightmare which myth had placed upon its chest.

Walter Benjamin

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

History is the myth, the true myth, of man's fall made manifest in time.

Henry Miller

A myth is a fixed way of looking at the world which cannot be destroyed because, looked at through the myth, all evidence supports the myth.

Edward de Bono

There are two questions that we have to ask ourselves. The first is 'Where am I going?' and the second is 'Who will go with me?'

Howard Thurman

The first myth of management is that it exists. The second myth of management is that success equals skill.

Robert Heller

It doesn't matter what is true; it only matters what people believe is true... You are what the media define you to be. [Greenpeace] became a myth and a myth-generating machine.

Paul Watson

A man who sets out to justify his existence and his activities has to distinguish two different questions. The first is whether the work which he does is worth doing; and the second is why he does it (whatever its value may be).

G. H. Hardy

It is commonly, but erroneously, believed that it is easy to ask questions. A fool, it is said, can ask questions that a wise man cannot answer. The fact is that a wise man can answer many questions that a fool cannot ask.

Cassius Jackson Keyser

How then can we account for the persistence of the myth that inside the empty nest lives a shattered and depressed shell of a woman--a woman in constant pain because her children no longer live under her roof? Is it possible that a notion so pervasive is, in fact, just a myth?

Lillian B. Rubin

But the myth of power is, of course, a very powerful myth, and probably most people in this world more or less believe in it. It is a myth, which, if everybody believes in it, becomes to that extent self-validating. But it is still epistemological lunacy and leads inevitably to various sorts of disaster.