Mythos Stephen Fry Quotes

Gaia visited her daughter Mnemosyne, who was busy being unpronounceable.

For the world seems never to offer anything worthwhile without also providing a dreadful opposite.

The Greeks created gods that were in their image; warlike but creative, wise but ferocious, loving but jealous, tender but brutal, compassionate, but vengeful.

Gaia listened carefully to this wise counsel and - as we all do, whether mortal or immortal - ignored it.

When lust descends, discretion, common sense and wisdom fly off and what may seem cunning concealment to one in the grip of passion looks like transparently clumsy idiocy to everyone else.

The seeding of Gaia gave us meaning, a germination of thought into shape. Seminal semantic semiology from the semen of the sky.

It is enough to say that the Greeks thought it was Chaos who, with a massive heave, or a great shrug, or hiccup, vomit or cough, began the long chain of creation that has ended with pelicans and penicillin and toadstools and toads, sea-lions, lions, human beings and daffodils and murder and art and love and confusion and death and madness and biscuits.

Painters, poets and philosophers have seen many things in the myth of Sisyphus. They have seen an image of the absurdity of human life, the futility of effort, the remorseless cruelty of fate, the unconquerable power of gravity. But they have seen too something of mankind’s courage, resilience, fortitude, endurance and self-belief. They see something heroic in our refusal to submit.

What Pandora did not know was that, when she shut the lid of the jar so hastily, she for ever imprisoned inside one last daughter of Nyx. One last little creature was left behind to beat its wings hopelessly in the jar for ever. Its name was ELPIS, Hope.

The Greek word for 'everything that is the case', what we could call 'the universe', is COSMOS. And at the moment - although 'moment' is a time word and makes no sense just now (neither does the phrase 'just now') - at the moment, Cosmos is Chaos and only Chaos because Chaos is the only thing that is the case.

Here Phaeton lies who in the sun-god’s chariot fared. And though greatly he failed, more greatly he dared.

Whatever the truth, science today agrees that everything is destined to return to Chaos. It calls this inevitable fate entropy: part of the great cycle from Chaos to order and back again to Chaos.

It is probably best for us not to concentrate in too literal a fashion on the temporal structure of myth.

Even meaning and destiny themselves can be read in ordinary things, if you have the gift.

Poseidon spent almost all his time pursuing a perfectly exhausting quantity of beautiful girls and boys and fathering by the girls an even greater number of monsters, demigods and human heroes - Percy Jackson and Theseus to name but two.

It is their refusal to see any divine beings as perfect, whole and complete of themselves, whether Zeus, Moros or Prometheus, that makes the Greeks so satisfying.

Brooding, simmering and raging in the ground, deep beneath the earth that once loved him, Ouranos compressed all his fury and divine energy into the very rock itself, hoping that one day some excavating creature somewhere would mine it and try to harness the immortal power that radiated from within. That could never happen, of course. It would be too dangerous. Surely the race had yet to be born that could be so foolish as to attempt to unleash the power of uranium?

Hermes, the Psychopomp.

She loved him, in fact; his violence and strength appealed to some deep part of her. He in turn grew to love her, so far as such a violent brute was capable of the emotion. Love and war, Venus and Mars, have always had a strong affinity. No one quite knows why, but plenty of money has been made trying to find an answer.

Kronos had seen by now that his wife was expecting and he readied himself for the happy day when he could consume the sixth of his children. He was taking no chances.

Dreams were told to priests on the morning after an overnight stay (known as an 'incubation') and Asclepius himself often manifested to patients. Especially, I believe, to those who paid the most.

Pandora’s imprisonment of it was a triumphant act that saved us from Zeus’s worst cruelty. With hope, Nietzsche argued, we are foolish enough to believe there is a point to existence, an end and a promise.

Real hot, fierce, flickering, flaming fire to enable them to melt, smelt, roast, toast, boil, broil, fashion and forge;

Priapus became the god of male genitalia and phalluses; he was especially prized by the Romans as the minor deity of the major boner.

as with almost all human practices, there are those who have the mysterious ability to raise the everyday and ordinary to the level of art.

Goodness me. You don’t ask for the moon, do you?” “Oh, what a good idea! The moon. Yes, I’d love the moon, please. That will be all. I’ll never ask for anything ever again ever.

This species, the mute swan, became holy to Apollo. In remembrance of the death of the beloved Phaeton the bird is silent all its life until the very moment of its death, when it sings with terrible melancholy its strange and lovely goodbye, its swan song. In honour of Cygnus the young of all swans are called ‘cygnets’.

We can’t just stand here in the rain with our backs to the town,’ said Baucis. ‘I’ll look if you will.’ ‘I love you Philemon, my husband.’ ‘I love you Baucis, my wife.’ They turned and looked down. They were just in time to see the great flood inundating Eumeneia before Philemon was turned into an oak tree and Baucis into a linden. For hundreds of years the two trees stood side by side, symbols of eternal love and humble kindness, their intertwining branches hung with the tokens left by admiring pilgrims.

Perhaps narcissism is best defined as a need to look on other people as mirrored surfaces who satisfy us only when they reflect back a loving or admiring image of ourselves. When we look into another’s eyes, in other words, we are not looking to see who they are, but how we are reflected in their eyes. By this definition, which of us can honestly disown our share of narcissism?

...we do not lend the hearth quite the importance that our ancestors did, Greek or otherwise. Yet, even for us, the word stands for something more than just a fireplace. We speak of 'hearth and home'. The word 'hearth' shares its ancestry with 'heart', just as the modern Greek for 'hearth' is kardia, which also means 'heart'. In Ancient Greece the wider concept of hearth and home was expressed by the oikos, which lives on for us today in economics and ecology. The Latin for hearth is focus - with speaks for itself. It is a strange and wonderful thing that out of the words for fireplace we have spun "cardiologist', 'deep focus' and 'eco-warrior'. The essential meaning of centrality that connects them also reveals the great significance of the hearth to the Greeks and Romans, and consequently the importance of Hestia, its presiding deity.

Creation at this time, peopled as it was by primal deities whose whole energy and purpose seems to have been directed towards reproduction, was endowed with an astonishing fertility. The soil was blessed with such a fecund richness that one could almost believe that if you planted a pencil it would burst into flower.

Thanatos, the grim, forbidding figure of Death.

HEDYLOGOS - the spirit of the language of love and terms of endearment, who now, one assumes, looks over Valentines cards, love-letters and romantic fiction.

The plans of the immortals, however, are as subject to the cruel tricks of Moros as are the plans of mortals.

It is enough to say that the Greeks thought it was Chaos who, with a massive heave, or a great shrug, or hiccup, vomit or cough, began the long chain of creation that has ended with pelicans and penicillin and toadstools and toads, sea-lions, seals, lions, human beings and daffodils and murder and art and love and confusion and death and madness and biscuits.

Strife’s sister NEMESIS was the embodiment of Retribution, that remorseless strand of cosmic justice that punishes presumptuous, overreaching ambition – the vice that the Greeks called hubris.

ERIS (DISCORDIA), Strife, lay behind all disagreements, divorces, scraps, skirmishes, fights, battles and wars. It was her malicious wedding present, the legendary Apple of Discord, that brought about the Trojan War,

To use a distinction made by E. M. Forster when talking about people in novels, the world now went from flat characters to rounded characters—to the development of personalities whose actions could surprise. The fun began.

Poseidon spent almost all his time pursuing a perfectly exhausting quantity of beautiful girls and boys and fathering by the girls an even greater number of monsters, demigods and human heroes – Percy Jackson and Theseus to name but two.

By the time he was twenty Asclepius had mastered all the arts of surgery and medicine. He embraced his teacher Chiron in a fond farewell and left to set up on his own as the world’s first physician, apothecary and healer. His fame spread around the Mediterranean with great speed. The sick, lame and unhappy flocked to his surgery, outside which he hung a sign – a wooden staff with a snake twined round it, seen to this day on many ambulances, clinics and (often disreputable) medical websites.

His humans were happy, yes; but to Prometheus such a safe, unchallenged, and unchallenging existence had no zest to it.

Of course the Greeks were not the only people to weave a tapestry of legends and lore out of the puzzling fabric of existence.

A little Learning is a dang’rous Thing; Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian Spring

The numerous moons of Saturn include Titan, Iapetus, Atlas, Prometheus, Hyperion, Tethys, Rhea, and Calypso.

Where am I?" 'Why, you are here, your highness.' 'And where is here?' 'Far from there but close to nearby.

Green fingers are better than gold.

Sisyphus is still there in the halls of Tartarus, pushing that boulder up the hill and getting almost to the top before it rolls back down and he has to start once again.

Greeks were the first people to make coherent narratives, a literature even, of their gods, monsters, and heroes.

Thalia The finest, funniest, friendliest Muse of all, THALIA supervised the comic arts and idyllic poetry. Her name derives from the Greek verb for ‘to flourish’.fn5 Like her tragic counterpart Melpomene she sports actors’ boots and a mask (hers being the cheerful smiling one of course), but she is wreathed in ivy and carries a bugle and a trumpet.

город Фест отмечал праздник, называемый экдисией. Согласно ритуалу все фетские юноши жили среди женщин и девушек, носили женское платье и обязаны были принести клятву гражданина, и лишь после этого их отпускали из агелы, или отрочества, и позволяли им мужское облачение и положение.

His heart lifted to a state approaching something like happiness, however, when he heard, unexpectedly, the sound of Rhea's low sweet voice humming gently to herself as she came up the slope towards the mountaintop. Loveliest sister and dearest wife! It was quite natural that she had been a little upset by his consumption of their six children, but she surely understood that he had had no choice. She was a Titan, she knew about duty and destiny.

Ixion had committed one of the first blood murders; unless he was cleansed of his transgression, the Furies would pursue him until he went mad. The princes, lords and neighbouring landowners of Thessaly had cause to dislike Ixion and none offered to perform the catharsis, the ritual process of purification that would redeem him.

So it was that the old Pelasgians drowned in the Great Deluge, and the Mediterranean world was repopulated by a new race descended through Deucalion and Pyrrha from Prometheus, Epimetheus, Pandora and – most importantly of course – from Gaia.fn7 And that is who we are, a compound of foresight and impulse, of all gifts and of the earth.

The civilized man is distinguished from the savage mainly by prudence, or, to use a slightly wider term, forethought. He is willing to endure present pains for the sake of future pleasures, even if the future pleasures are rather distant … True forethought only arises when a man does something towards which no impulse urges him, because his reason tells him that he will profit by it at some future date … the individual, having acquired the habit of viewing his life as a whole, increasingly sacrifices his present to his future.

Here Phaeton lies who in the sun-god’s chariot fared. And though greatly he failed, more greatly he dared.

Besides, I can hear the beasts stamping and lowing in the back. I’d know their moo anywhere. That baby is a thief and I demand—

With hope, Nietzsche argued, we are foolish enough to believe there is a point to existence, an end and a promise.

Marsyas skidded to a halt, the assorted satyrs, fauns, and Maenads behind bumping into him and each other in a concertina of confusion.

Poseidon presented Amphitrite with the very first dolphin.

all

America’s oldest debating union, founded in Princeton by James Madison, Aaron Burr, and others, is called the Cliosophical Society in her honor.

Chaos

don’t

Next Gaia visited her daughter Mnemosyne, who was busy being unpronounceable.

because long dresses are stupid and impractical.

It is easier to hide a hundred mountains from a jealous wife than one mistress.

murder and art and love and confusion and death and madness and biscuits.

This is so similar to the story of Apollo and Hyacinthus that you wonder if some bard somewhere got drunk or confused.

Smyrna’s baby grew up to be a youth of the most unparalleled physical attractiveness. Oh dear, I’ve written this too many times for you to believe me again.

pollute any happiness or satisfaction he might have enjoyed as king. Consigned to the Dust After many years of peace and prosperity in Thebes, Cadmus and

six male, six female. The males were OCEANUS, COEUS, CRIUS, HYPERION, IAPETUS and KRONOS. The females, THEIA, THEMIS, MNEMOSYNE, PHOEBE, TETHYS and RHEA.

The susurration of rushes and the hiss of sedges was swept on by the grasses and leaves of the trees and swiftly the soughing of cypresses and sallows sent the sound through the breeze.

Their myths understand that whoever created this baffling world, with its cruelties, wonders, caprices, beauties, madness, and injustice, must themselves have been cruel, wonderful, capricious, beautiful, mad, and unjust. The Greeks created gods that were in their image: warlike but creative, wise but ferocious, loving but jealous, tender but brutal, compassionate but vengeful.

He bought a couch that he adorned with silks of Tyrian purple. He lay her upon it and sang ballads to her. Like most great visual artists he was an incompetent musician and a deplorable poet.

When she told him the news he hugged her and hugged her and they danced around the palace making so much noise that Helios banged on the walls and grumbled that some people had to be up before dawn.

Когато връхлети похотта, дискретността, здравият разум и мъдростта отлитат, а онова, което изглежда хитро прикритие за пленника на страстта, в очите на всички останали е прозрачна и неумела идиотщина.

Nephele, the cloud image of Hera, went on to marry a Boeotian king called ATHAMAS,fn2 by whom she bore two sons, PHRIXUS and HELLE. Nephele had cause to save the life of Phrixus – an Isaac to his father’s Abraham – when Athamas tied his son to the ground and made to sacrifice him. Just as the Hebrew god revealed a ram in a thicket to Abraham and saved Isaac’s life, so Nephele sent a golden ram to rescue her son Phrixus.

Ouranos was revolted by them. Maybe he was most horrified by the thought that he, Lord of the Sky, could have fathered such strange and ugly things, but I think that like most hatred his revulsion was rooted in fear.

POLYHYMNIA was the Muse of hymns, of sacred music, dance, poetry, and rhetoric as well as—slightly randomly one might think—agriculture, pantomime, geometry, and meditation. I suppose today we would call her “the Muse of mindfulness.

Библия короля Иакова приводит завершение XII главы Первого послания св. Павла коринфянам (написанного по-гречески. само собой) так: "А теперь пребывают сии три: вера, надежда, любовь; но любовь из них больше". В современном переводе "братолюбие" переводится просто как "любовь

After Moros came a great rush of offspring, one after the other, like a monstrous airborne invasion. First came APATE, Deceit, whom the Romans called FRAUS (from whom we derive the words “fraud,” “fraudulent,” and “fraudster”). She scuttled off to Crete where she bided her time. GERAS, Old Age, was born next; not necessarily so fearful a demon as we might think today. While Geras might take away suppleness, youth, and agility, for the Greeks he more than made up for it by conferring dignity, wisdom, and authority. SENECTUS is his Roman name, a word that shares the same root as “senior,” “senate,” and “senile.

Chaos who, with a massive heave, or a great shrug, or hiccup, vomit, or cough, began the long chain of creation that has ended with pelicans and penicillin and toadstools and toads, sea lions, seals, lions, human beings, and daffodils and murder and art and love and confusion and death and madness and biscuits.

taught him how to look into the hearts and judge the intentions of others. How to imagine and how to reason. How to find the strength to let passions cool before acting. How to make a plan and how to know when a plan needed to be changed or abandoned. How to let the head rule the heart and the heart win the affection of others.

For a year she taught him how to look into the hearts and judge the intentions of others. How to imagine and how to reason. How to find the strength to let passions cool before acting. How to make a plan and how to know when a plan needed to be changed or abandoned. How to let the head rule the heart and the heart win the affection of others.

Ressamlar, şairler ve filozoflar, Sisyphos mitine dair pek çok şey gördüler. İnsan yaşamının absürtlüğünü, çabanın beyhudeliğini, kaderin amansız zalimliğini, yerçekiminin yenilmez gücünü gördüler. Ancak insanlığın cesaretine, direncine, dayanıklılığına ve kendine olan inancına dair şeyler de gördüler. Boyun eğmeyi reddedişimize dair kahramanca şeyler gördüler.

Narsizmi belki de en iyi şekilde, başka insanlar bizim sevgi ve hayranlık dolu görüntümüzü yansıtırken onları bizi tatmin eden ayna yüzeyler olarak görme ihtiyacı olarak tanımlanabilir. Yani başka birinin gözlerine baktığımızda "onların" kim olduğunu görmek için değil, "onların gözlerinde" bizim nasıl göründüğümüzü görmek için bakıyoruz. Bu tanıma göre, kim içimizdeki Narsizm parçasını dürüstçe reddedebilir?

But in this story, as in so many others, what we really discern is the deceptive, ambiguous and giddy riddle of violence, passion, poetry and symbolism that lies at the heart of Greek myth and refuses to be solved. An algebra too unstable properly to be computed, it is human-shaped and god-shaped, not pure and mathematical. It is fun trying to interpret such symbols and narrative turns, but the substitutions don't quite work and the answers yielded are usually no clearer than those of an equivocating oracle.

It is enough to say that the Greeks thought it was Chaos who, with a massive heave, or a great shrug, or hiccup, vomit or cough, began the long chain of creation that has ended with pelicans and penicillin and toadstools and toads, sea-lions, seals, lions, human beings and daffodils and murder and art and love and confusion and death and madness and biscuits. Whatever the truth, science today agrees that everything is destined to return to Chaos. It calls this inevitable fate entropy: part of the great cycle from Chaos to order and back again to Chaos. Your

Whether Chaos brought life and substance out of nothing or whether Chaos yawned life up or dreamed it up, or conjured it up in some other way, I don’t know. I wasn’t there. Nor were you. And yet in a way we were, because all the bits that make us were there. It is enough to say that the Greeks thought it was Chaos who, with a massive heave, or a great shrug, or hiccup, vomit, or cough, began the long chain of creation that has ended with pelicans and penicillin and toadstools and toads, sea lions, seals, lions, human beings, and daffodils and murder and art and love and confusion and death and madness and biscuits. Whatever the truth, science today agrees that everything is destined to return to Chaos. It calls this inevitable fate entropy: part of the great cycle from Chaos to order and back again to Chaos.