I just had a hunch that there might be kernels of truth or reality - scientific or historical reality - in stories about nature that are perpetuated in oral myths. That's how I got interested in it.
Adrienne Mayor
We are used to thinking of Amazon myths in terms of violence against uppity women, but the ancient evidence also reveals a vision of gender equality.
The nomads' egalitarian lifestyle astonished the Greeks, who kept their own women indoors weaving and minding children. The exotic Scythian lifestyle fueled the Greek imagination and led to an outpouring of myths about fierce Amazons, 'the equals of men.'
I have discovered that if you take all the places of Greek myths, those specific locales turn out to be abundant fossil sites, but there is also a lot of natural knowledge embedded in those myths, showing that Greek perceptions about fossils were pretty amazing for prescientific people.
With each film, I get more and more involved and it's more and more time-consuming. Also, I like to break myths and people's preconceived ideas. My characters have always stood for something, have always had an opinion, although they've never really rebelled.
Aishwarya Rai Bachchan
The myths underlying our culture and underlying our common sense have not taught us to feel identical with the universe, but only parts of it, only in it, only confronting it - aliens.
Alan Watts
Myths grow all the time. If I was to listen to the number of times I've thrown teacups then we've gone through some crockery in this place. It's completely exaggerated, but I don't like people arguing back with me.
Alex Ferguson
I'm certainly not surprised by the passion of the youth for our myths. Mythology is almost a part of an Indian's DNA.
Amish Tripathi
Myths are part of our DNA. We're a civilisation with a continuous culture. The effort to modernize it keeps it alive. Readers connect with it.
India has a long tradition of reinterpreting religious myths.
A good nationalism has to depend on a principle of the common people, on myths of a struggling commonality.
Andrew O'Hagan
Mother goddesses are just as silly a notion as father gods. If a revival of the myths of these cults gives woman emotional satisfaction, it does so at the price of obscuring the real conditions of life. This is why they were invented in the first place.
Angela Carter
For most of the history of our species we were helpless to understand how nature works. We took every storm, drought, illness and comet personally. We created myths and spirits in an attempt to explain the patterns of nature.
Ann Druyan
My mother might find a thin gold chain at the back of a drawer, wadded into an impossibly tight knot, and give it to me to untangle. It would have a shiny, sweaty smell, and excite me: Gold chains linked you to the great fairy tales and myths, to Arabia, and India; to the great weight of the world, but lighter than a feather.
Anne Lamott
The problem is the myths of Area 51 are hard to dispute if no one can speak on the record about what actually happened there.
Annie Jacobsen
Myths and creeds are heroic struggles to comprehend the truth in the world.
Ansel Adams
For many people, Timbuktu has long represented the essence of remoteness: a mythical, faraway place located on the boundaries of our collective consciousness. But like many of the myths associated with colonialism, the reality is very different.
Antonio Guterres
As we were developing 'Umbral', and I was delving into the mythology and legends, I had a sudden realisation. 'Wasteland' is about people who fervently believe new myths and legends, but they turn out to be false; whereas 'Umbral' is about people who reject ancient myths and legends, but they turn out to be true!
Antony Johnston
Mythology works... because Indians have been bred on myths.
Ashwin Sanghi
Myths are a waste of time. They prevent progression.
Barbra Streisand
The power of the print reviewer is one of those urban myths. There have always been shows that slipped under the critical radar to become popular successes: 'Tobacco Road', 'Abie's Irish Rose' and our old friend 'Spider-Man', which got the worst reviews in theatre history and is still apparently going strong.
2013 was a year of myths falling apart. The myth of President Obama - a myth in which Obama was a messianic figure descending to bequeath health care, equality, and brotherhood on mankind - imploded. The myth of an America embracing the leftist social agenda collapsed.
The outstanding truths of life, the great and unquestioned phenomena of society, are not to be argued away as myths and vagaries when they do not fit within our little moulds. If necessary, we must remake the moulds.
There is something feeble and a little contemptible about a man who cannot face the perils of life without the help of comfortable myths.
Part of the job for me and others from El Paso who live along the border is to dispel the myths about how supposedly dangerous the border is.
I truly appreciate the special qualities that America and American national myths offer me.
I agree with people like Richard Dawkins that mankind felt the need for creation myths. Before we really began to understand disease and the weather and things like that, we sought false explanations for them. Now science has filled in some of the realm - not all - that religion used to fill.
I intend to explode the myths about myself and get down to the real truth about the legend that is Batman.
Don't let the myths make you believe that women don't support other women.
The same myths are told in every culture, and they might swap out details, but it's still the same story. It's the same story, but with a different face.
On The Practice, I get to do what I love to do, and I am making a contribution that will, in the end, help raise social consciousness, dispel some of the myths about being large, and change the way that people view and interact with large people.
We hunger to understand, so we invent myths about how we imagine the world is constructed - and they're, of course, based upon what we know, which is ourselves and other animals. So we make up stories about how the world was hatched from a cosmic egg or created after the mating of cosmic deities or by some fiat of a powerful being.
Today, we're still loaded down - and, to some extent, embarrassed - by ancient myths, but we respect them as part of the same impulse that has led to the modern, scientific kind of myth. But we now have the opportunity to discover, for the first time, the way the universe is in fact constructed as opposed to how we would wish it to be constructed.
We obsess about celebrities. We create them, build myths around them, and then hunt them and destroy them. I don't know where it's taking us or what it means, but I know we do it. I have seen a lot of it myself.
The logical man must either deny all miracles or none, and our American Indian myths and hero stories are perhaps, in themselves, quite as credible as those of the Hebrews of old.
I'd like to explode a few myths about what we call classical music. It's not high art for the titillation of a chosen few.
If you look back at the great classics and the epics and myths, they were for everyone. Different people got different things from them, but everyone was invited to participate.
There are a lot of myths about fat loss, and I wanted to explain how to do it properly, without obsessing over silly fads.
Growing up as a Brit, Arthur and Merlin and Camelot, and just the idea of it, is embedded in the culture and in your soul, growing up. King Arthur is alongside Robin Hood, as those great British folk tales, myths and icons.
I'm interested in authentic experience and the essence of that creative place, and where those myths begin and where they become real on any level.
But the West did not last long enough. Its folk myths and heroes became stage properties of Hollywood before the poets had begun to get to work on them.
My 'Black Panther' run really wasn't about Black Panther. It was about Ross. It was about exploding myths about black superheroes, black characters, and black people, targeted specifically at a white, male-dominated retailer base.
The myths that are created about the South, about the way we grew up, about black people, are wrong.
I therefore claim to show, not how men think in myths, but how myths operate in men's minds without their being aware of the fact.
Young people are constantly absorbing - through media, textbooks, and policy - the myths of American exceptionalism; for black children, this means that what they are taught in class does not match the world that they navigate daily.
People create the sort of myths they want to believe about themselves.
The sea always offers up incredible stories of survivors' fortitude. Myths of a lot of countries have variations on that.
Magic is at the core of myths.
There are a lot of myths about gay people.
The myths have always condemned those who 'looked back.' Condemned them, whatever the paradise may have been which they were leaving. Hence this shadow over each departure from your decision.
