Quotessence
Home / Quotes / Quote by Neel Burton

Quote by Neel Burton

“Ultimately, whether myth is religion or folk tale is, and always has been, a question of faith. When Europeans encountered the narratives of the peoples they colonized, they dismissed them as ‘myths’—whence the modern, pejorative sense of ‘myth’ as ‘fiction’ or ‘falsehood’—but their own Garden of Eden, Holy Trinity, and Easter Resurrection they regarded instead as theology.”

Quote by Neel Burton

Work

Author

Neel Burton
Neel Burton

Neel Burton is an expert in an unknown field, born on June 3, 1978. His biography and contributions are not yet clear, and more information is needed. more

You May Also Like

“I continue to grapple to find new terminology for talking about the religious life. Each age needs its own language for understanding enduring truths, and while many people feel uncomfortable talking about religion, our ego-centered, so-called real life is disintegrating at this point in history. The ancient world didn’t have much of what we call reality; they lived, instead, by the slender threads. We have gained ego reality but have lost the mystical and religious functions that should guide our lives.”

“...all you have to do is read the newspaper. It's a mess. On this immediate level of life and structure, myths offer life models. But the models have to be appropriate to the time in which you are living, and our time has changed so fast that what was proper fifty years ago is not proper today. The virtues of the past are the vices of today. And many of what were thought to be the vices of the past are the necessities of today. The moral order has to catch up with the moral necessities of actual life in time, here and now. And that is what we are not doing. The old-time religion belongs to another age, another people, another set of human values, another universe. By going back you throw yourself out of sync with history.”

“His gaze, which had been following the circling fruit, flickered to mine. I did not have time to look away before he said, softly but distinctly, “Catch.” A fig leapt from the pattern in a graceful arc towards me. It fell into the cup of my palms, soft and slightly warm. I was aware of the boys cheering. One by one, Achilles caught the remaining fruits, returned them to the table with a performer’s flourish. Except for the last, which he ate, the dark flesh parting to pink seeds under his teeth. The fruit was perfectly ripe, the juice brimming. Without thinking, I brought the one he had thrown me to my lips. Its burst of grainy sweetness filled my mouth; the skin was downy on my tongue. I had loved figs, once.”

“I believe in love at first sight… But it’s not the first moment you lay eyes on a person, it’s the moment you first see the person they truly are.”

“All we who write put me in mind of sailors hastily making rafts upon doomed ships. When we break up under the heavy years and go down into eternity with all that is ours our thoughts like small lost rafts float on awhile upon Oblivion’s sea. They will not carry much over those tides, our names and a phrase or two and little else. They that write as a trade to please the whim of the day, they are like sailors that work at the rafts only to warm their hands and to distract their thoughts from their certain doom; their rafts go all to pieces before the ship breaks up. See now Oblivion shimmering all around us, its very tranquility deadlier than tempest. How little all our keels have troubled it. Time in its deeps swims like a monstrous whale; and, like a whale, feeds on the littlest things--small tunes and little unskilled songs of the olden, golden evenings--and anon turneth whale-like to overthrow whole ships. See now the wreckage of Babylon floating idly, and something there that once was Nineveh; already their kings and queens are in the deeps among the weedy masses of old centuries that hide the sodden bulk of sunken Tyre and make a darkness round Persepolis. For the rest I dimly see the forms of foundered ships on the sea-floor strewn with crowns. Our ships were all unseaworthy from the first. There goes the raft that Homer made for Helen.”