A Quote by Gilbert Ryle

A myth is, of course, not a fairy story. It is the presentation of facts belonging to one category in the idioms appropriate to another. To explode a myth is accordingly not to deny the facts but to re-allocate them.

Gilbert Ryle

Quote Topics

Accordingly Another Appropriate Belonging Category Course Deny Explode Facts Fairy Idioms Myth Presentation Story Them

Quote Author

Gilbert Ryle
British - Philosopher
August 19, 1900 - October 6, 1976

To explode a myth is accordingly not to deny the facts but to re-allocate them.

Gilbert Ryle

Facts are simple and facts are straight. Facts are lazy and facts are late. Facts all come with points of view. Facts don't do what I want them to. Facts just twist the truth around. Facts are living turned inside out.

David Byrne

Facts are neutral until human beings add their own meaning to those facts. People make their decisions based on what the facts mean to them, not on the facts themselves. The meaning they add to facts depends on their current story … facts are not terribly useful to influencing others. People don’t need new facts—they need a new story.

Blake Mycoskie

The myth does not point to a fact; the myth points beyond facts to something that informs the fact

Joseph Campbell

We should never have to do whatever Messi says. I did not pay attention to him, not even in the national team. But that is the myth that has been formed. But it is not just me: a lot of people have said it, but of course you won't believe it from me... It is not me who is denying it. The facts deny it.

Gerardo Martino

But if it not be true, the myth itself requires to be explained, and every principle of philosophy and common sense demand that the explanation be sought, not in arbitrary allegorical categories, but in the actual facts of ritual or religious custom to which the myth attaches.

William Robertson Smith

In terms of the mechanics of story, myth is an intriguing one because we didn't make myth up; myth is an imprinture of the human condition.

Baz Luhrmann

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

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.

Gregory Bateson

[The scientist] believes passionately in facts, in measured facts. He believes there are no bad facts, that all facts are good facts, though they may be facts about bad things, and his intellectual satisfaction can come only from the acquisition of accurately known facts, from their organization into a body of knowledge, in which the inter-relationship of the measured facts is the dominant consideration.

Robert Watson-Watt

And in the absence of facts, myth rushes in, the kudzu of history.

Stacy Schiff

Myth is the facts of the mind made manifest in a fiction of matter.

Maya Deren

The myth of the impossible dream is more powerful than all the facts of history.

Robert Fulghum

The story of trying to live up to the myth is more interesting than the myth itself.

Alexi Zentner

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

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.