The Myths We Live By Quotes

“Hubris calls for nemesis, and in one form or another it's going to get it, not as a punishment from outside but as the completion of a pattern already started.”
― Mary Midgley, The Myths We Live By

“What great philosophers do for us is not to hand out such an all-purpose system. It is to light up and clarify some special aspect of life, to supply conceptual tools which will do a certain necessary kind of work. Wide though that area of work may be, it is never the whole, and all ideas lose their proper power when they are used out of their appropriate context. That is why one great philosopher does not necessarily displace another, why there is room for all of them and a great many more whom we do not have yet.”
― Mary Midgley, The Myths We Live By

“By contrast, if one conceives the idea of human rights as centring on the notion that each individual is completely autonomous and should have entire control over its own fate, this seems to me unrealistic even for human beings, and far too one-sided to be used as a central tool of morality.”
― Mary Midgley, The Myths We Live By

“our dominant technology shapes our symbolism and thereby our metaphysics, our view about what is real.”
― Mary Midgley, The Myths We Live By

“Myths are not lies. Nor are they detached stories. They are imaginative patterns, networks of powerful symbols that suggest particular ways of interpreting the world. They shape its meaning.”
― Mary Midgley, The Myths We Live By

“We are accustomed to think of myths as the opposite of science. But in fact they are a central part of it: the part that decides its significance in our lives. So we very much need to understand them.”
― Mary Midgley, The Myths We Live By

“At present, when people become aware of this [common metaphorical] imagery, they tend to think of it as merely a surface dressing of isolated metaphors - as a kind of optional decorative paint that is sometimes added to ideas after they are formed, so as to make them clear to outsiders. But really such symbolism is an integral part of our thought-structure. It does crucial work on all topics, not just in a few supposedly marginal areas such as religion and emotion, where symbols are known to be at home, but throughout our thinking.”
― Mary Midgley, The Myths We Live By

“information on its own has no value. It only begins to have a value when it supplies a need, when it is brought into contact with some existing system of aims and purposes and fills a gap in that system, when it becomes relevant to people’s beliefs and attitudes.”
― Mary Midgley, The Myths We Live By