The Wisdom of the Myths Quotes

“the adorable yappings of a young puppy!”
― Luc Ferry, The Wisdom of the Myths: How Greek Mythology Can Change Your Life

“To maintain power requires justice and intelligence as well as force.”
― Luc Ferry, The Wisdom of the Myths: How Greek Mythology Can Change Your Life

“This point is absolutely essential to Greek myth: it is always through justice that one gains one’s ends, ultimately, because justice is fundamentally nothing more than a form of adherence to—adjustment to—the cosmic order. Each time someone forgets this and goes against the rule of order, the latter is in the end restored, destroying the interloper. This lesson of human experience emerges already in veiled form in mythology: only a just order is permanent, and the days of injustice are always numbered.”
― Luc Ferry, The Wisdom of the Myths: How Greek Mythology Can Change Your Life

“aegis”
― Luc Ferry, The Wisdom of the Myths: How Greek Mythology Can Change Your Life

“pleiad”
― Luc Ferry, The Wisdom of the Myths: How Greek Mythology Can Change Your Life

“appellation”
― Luc Ferry, The Wisdom of the Myths: How Greek Mythology Can Change Your Life

“trenchant”
― Luc Ferry, The Wisdom of the Myths: How Greek Mythology Can Change Your Life

“interstices,”
― Luc Ferry, The Wisdom of the Myths: How Greek Mythology Can Change Your Life

“rough-hewn,”
― Luc Ferry, The Wisdom of the Myths: How Greek Mythology Can Change Your Life

“theogony” and “cosmogony.” What do they mean? In truth, these archaic Greek terms are quite simple, as well as interchangeable. The birth (-gony) of the world (cosmos) and the birth (-gony) of the gods (theo) are one and the same: the cosmogony, the birth of the cosmos, is also and reciprocally a theogony, a story about the origins of divinity.”
― Luc Ferry, The Wisdom of the Myths: How Greek Mythology Can Change Your Life

“to name them in order of appearance) Chaos, Gaia, Tartarus, and Eros. Nothing else, as yet, has come into existence.”
― Luc Ferry, The Wisdom of the Myths: How Greek Mythology Can Change Your Life

“another divinity is present at this moment of origins, namely Tartarus.”
― Luc Ferry, The Wisdom of the Myths: How Greek Mythology Can Change Your Life

“how do we pass from chaos to “cosmos”: from disorder to the perfect and just regimen of a magnificently ordained natural dispensation upon which the sun gently shines?”
― Luc Ferry, The Wisdom of the Myths: How Greek Mythology Can Change Your Life

“It is from these three primordial entities—Chaos, Gaia, and Eros—that everything will come to life, and the world will progressively organize itself.”
― Luc Ferry, The Wisdom of the Myths: How Greek Mythology Can Change Your Life

“Gaia—which in Greek means “the earth.”
― Luc Ferry, The Wisdom of the Myths: How Greek Mythology Can Change Your Life

“parti-colored”
― Luc Ferry, The Wisdom of the Myths: How Greek Mythology Can Change Your Life

“write clearly, to refrain from obscure allusions or from supposing that my audience possesses any prior knowledge”
― Luc Ferry, The Wisdom of the Myths: How Greek Mythology Can Change Your Life

“archaic,”
― Luc Ferry, The Wisdom of the Myths: How Greek Mythology Can Change Your Life

“Dionysus,”
― Luc Ferry, The Wisdom of the Myths: How Greek Mythology Can Change Your Life

“the fundamental task that was originally that of Zeus: to struggle against the ceaselessly regrouping forces of chaos so that order may prevail over disorder, cosmos and concord over discord.”
― Luc Ferry, The Wisdom of the Myths: How Greek Mythology Can Change Your Life

“if wisdom consists in finding our natural place in a divine and everlasting order, so as to live our lives reconciled to the present moment, the madness of hubris consists in a contrary attitude, a proud and “chaotic” revolt against our human condition as simple mortals. A large number of mythological stories revolve around this crucial theme, and it is important to resist reading them—as is so often and so mistakenly attempted—according to a modern ethical framework inherited from Christianity.”
― Luc Ferry, The Wisdom of the Myths: How Greek Mythology Can Change Your Life

“Nietzsche was to reiterate this, long after the Greeks—which proves in passing that their message preserves an actuality such as can still be found in modern philosophy: the ultimate end of human life is what Nietzsche calls amor fati, or “love of one’s fate.” To embrace everything that is the case, our destiny—which, in essence, means the present moment, considered as the highest form of wisdom, and the only form that can rid us of what Spinoza (whom Nietzsche regarded as “a brother”) named, equally memorably, the “sad passions”: fear, hatred, guilt, remorse, those corrupters of the soul that bog us down in mirages of the past or of the future. Only our reconciliation to the present, to the present moment—in Greek, the kairos—can, for Nietzsche, as for Greek culture as a whole, lead to proper serenity, to the “innocence of becoming,” in other words to salvation, understood not in its religious meaning but in the sense of discovering ourselves as saved, finally, from those fears that diminish existence, stunting and shriveling it.”
― Luc Ferry, The Wisdom of the Myths: How Greek Mythology Can Change Your Life

“The whole sense of the voyage of Odysseus, which we shall trace or retrace in chapter three, starts here: the good life is the life reconciled to what is the case, the life lived in its natural place, within the cosmic order, and it behooves each of us to find this place and accomplish this voyage if we want one day to arrive in the harbor of wisdom, of serenity.”
― Luc Ferry, The Wisdom of the Myths: How Greek Mythology Can Change Your Life

“primordial”
― Luc Ferry, The Wisdom of the Myths: How Greek Mythology Can Change Your Life

“seminal”
― Luc Ferry, The Wisdom of the Myths: How Greek Mythology Can Change Your Life

“It is easy to hire someone else to do work for us—someone to clean, someone to tend the garden—but no one can take our place along that road that leads to the conquest of our fears, so that we can adapt to the world and find our right place in it.”
― Luc Ferry, The Wisdom of the Myths: How Greek Mythology Can Change Your Life

“once inserted into the cosmos, once his individual life is set going in harmony with the cosmic order, the wise man understands that we simple mortals are merely a fragment of this whole, an atom of eternity, so to speak, one element of a totality that cannot disappear. So that, ultimately, for the sage, death ceases to be truly real. In a nutshell, death is but a passage from one state to another—and, considered as such, it should no longer hold any terrors for us.”
― Luc Ferry, The Wisdom of the Myths: How Greek Mythology Can Change Your Life

“recondite”
― Luc Ferry, The Wisdom of the Myths: How Greek Mythology Can Change Your Life

“The fundamental idea, then, is that within the cosmic order that philosophical inquiry would subsequently explore—the order established by Zeus (according to the inaugural mythological narratives) after a series of wars against the forces of chaos—each of us has his appointed or “natural” place. In this perspective, wisdom and justice consist fundamentally in the effort by humans to find this place. A lute maker adjusts one by one the multiple pieces of wood that constitute his instrument before they can enter into harmony with each other (and if the sound post of the instrument, sometimes referred to as the âme, or “soul”—the small dowel of white wood that spans the top and back plates of the lute—is badly positioned, then the latter will cease to sound properly, will fail to be harmonious). So, too, we humans must, in the image of Odysseus of Ithaca, find our place in life and occupy it under pain of not otherwise being able to accomplish our mission in the scheme of things, in which event we shall encounter nothing but unhappiness. This is indeed the message that Greek philosophy, for the most part, was to draw from the mythological past.”
― Luc Ferry, The Wisdom of the Myths: How Greek Mythology Can Change Your Life

“the Greek philosophical tradition thought of the world as, first and foremost, an overarching order: at once harmonious, just, beautiful, and good. The word “cosmos” connotes all of this. For the Stoics, for example, to whom the Latin poet Ovid defers in his Metamorphoses—when reinterpreting after his fashion the great myths dealing with the origins of the world—the universe resembles a magnificent living organism. If we want to get an idea of this, we might think of what doctors or physiologists or biologists discover when they dissect a rabbit or a mouse. What do they find? Firstly, that each organ is marvelously adapted to its function: What is better constructed than an eye for seeing, than lungs for oxygenating the muscles, than a heart for pumping blood via an irrigation system? These organs are a thousand times more ingenious, more harmonious and complex, than almost all of the machines devised by man. Moreover, our biologist discovers something else: that the ensemble of these organs, which considered individually are sufficiently astonishing, together form a quite perfect and “logical” whole—what the Stoics indeed named the logos, to refer to the coherent ordering of the world as well as to verbal discourse—and a whole that is infinitely superior again to any human invention. From this point of view, we must humbly acknowledge that the creation of even the humblest being—a tiny ant, a mouse, or a frog—is still far beyond the reach of our most sophisticated scientific laboratories.”
― Luc Ferry, The Wisdom of the Myths: How Greek Mythology Can Change Your Life