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Quotes of the Day for 15 July 2009 – Myth
Thomas Bulfinch was born at Newton, Massachusetts on this day in 1796, to architect Charles Bulfinch and his wife just in time for Charles to lose his fortune in a housing project that he had designed. The well connected parents were still able to ensure that Thomas was well educated at Boston Latin School, the Phillips Exeter Academy, and Harvard College, and that he was acquainted with the leaders of Boston society. After Harvard (graduated 1814) he held various business jobs, then clerked at Boston Merchants' Bank from 1837 until his death. He detailed the Greek, Roman, and Norse mythology in The Age of Fable in 1855, covered the myths of King Arthur and other English legends in The Age of Chivalry, and published Legends of Charlemagne in 1863, the three volumes that together make up Bulfinch's Mythology. Lived with his parents while they lived, and even after his success started with The Age of Fable he continued at the bank and lived in a boarding house.
The quotes:
Hollywood grew to be the most flourishing factory of popular mythology since the Greeks.
- Alfred Alistair Cooke, 1908 - 2004
Without an understanding of myth or religion, without an understanding of the relationship between destruction and creation, death and rebirth, the individual suffers the mysteries of life as meaningless mayhem alone.
- Marion Woodman
Myth must be kept alive. The people who can keep it alive are the artists of one kind or another. The function of the artist is the mythologization of the environment and the world.
- Joseph Campbell, 1904 - 1987
There is a wonderful mythical law of nature that the three things we crave most in life - happiness, freedom, and peace of mind - are always attained by giving them to someone else.
- Peyton C. March, 1864 - 1955
If you take myth and folklore, and these things that speak in symbols, they can be interpreted in so many ways that although the actual image is clear enough, the interpretation is infinitely blurred, a sort of enormous rainbow of every possible color you could imagine.
- Diana Wynne Jones
Myths which are believed in tend to become true.
- George Orwell, 1903 - 1950
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