Stories, myths and tales… Three words that are synonymous in many ways. Some would even put “being human” as another synonym to those words, or more correctly storytelling. You can define the human species in a variety of different ways, the ability to share stories with each other is one of them.
In this article I’ve compiled 15 powerful quotes that highlight the importance of storytelling in our lives, in regards to us as individuals but also collectively in society.
To survive, you must tell stories.
Umberto Eco
This one is powerful. Obviously physiologically or biologically this statement by Umberto Eco most likely isn’t true. Eco suggests that something which is essentially human is dependent on telling stories to each other. We could go on surviving by just existing biologically, but to come alive we ‘must’ tell stories.
Stories can conquer fear, you know. They can make the heart bigger.
Ben Okri
You can gain strength and courage through hearing and reading about the great deeds of other people. This is a fact.
Some stories are true that never happened.
Elie Wiesel
Profound, especially in the context of myths. Myths tell of supernatural events, deities and beasts which obviously for the most part isn’t true, yet the moral lessons they teach are priceless. Lessons like for example: to be satisfied with what you have in the myth of King Midas, or the importance of hospitality in the story of Philemon and Baucis, or knowing your limits in the myth of Phaethon.
To hell with facts! We need stories!
Ken Kesey
Yep, sometimes we are fed with too much information and facts about everything under the sun, while getting to no wisdom which stories and myths are abundant in.
Be amusing: never tell unkind stories; above all, never tell long ones.
Benjamin Disraeli
Its important to make it entertaining!
The seaman tells stories of winds, the ploughman of bulls; the soldier details his wounds, the shepherd his sheep.
Laurence J. Peter
Everyone expresses their own truths and what they’ve learnt from life. We all have unique stories, this is one of the many subtle beauties of life.
There have been great societies that did not use the wheel, but there have been no societies that did not tell stories.
Ursula K. LeGuin
People did not wait until there was writing before they told stories and sang songs.
Albert Bates Lord
The lies we live will always be confessed in the stories that we tell.
Orison Scott Card
I heard stories from my mother’s mother who was an American Indian. She was spiritual, although she did not go to church, but she had the hum. She used to tell me stories of the rivers.
Tina Turner
If you don’t know the trees you may be lost in the forest, but if you don’t know the stories you may be lost in life.
Siberian Elder
The greatest stories are those that resonate our beginnings and intuit our endings, our mysterious origins and our numinous destinies, and dissolve them both into one.
Ben Okri
The answer is always in the entire story, not a piece of it.
Jim Harrison
People are hungry for stories. It’s part of our very being. Storytelling is a form of history, of immortality too. It goes from one generation to another.
Studs Terkel
Stories live in your blood and bones, follow the seasons and light candles on the darkest night-every storyteller knows she or he is also a teacher…
Patti Davis
Daniel Seeker is a wandering dervish and lifelong student of the past, present and future. He realized that he was made of immaculate and timeless consciousness when meditating in his hermit cave on the island of Gotland. His writings are mostly a reflection of that realizaton. Daniel currently studies history, philosophy, egyptology and western esotericism at Uppsala Universitet. He’s also currently writing his B.A. thesis in history which explores how Buddhist and Hindu texts were first properly translated and introduced to the western world in the late 18th and 19th century.