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“Living well is the
best revenge.”
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George Herbert
Jacula Prudentum
1651
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1001 Quotations to Inspire your Life
“In addition to being a highly influential English metaphysical and religious poet, George Herbert was an inveterate collector of idiomatic verbal expressions.
His first publication in this area was Outlandish Proverbs Selected by Mr. G. H., in 1640. Twelve years later, he produced an expanded version of this work under the title Jacula Prudentum, in which the above quotation first appeared in print.
The underlying meaning is that people should never give their enemies the satisfaction of knowing that they have upset 😢 or hurt 😔 them; that no matter how great the humiliation to which one has been subjected, one must carry on as if undiminished by hostility and malice — put a brave face on it all.
In his youth, actor Rob Lowe was a Hollywood hellraiser. Around the time he starred in The Outsiders (1983), people said he was going to destroy himself, almost certainly professionally and probably physically as well.
But he cleaned up his act, married, had children and thirty years later he told The Huffington Post that he’d been inspired to go straight by the thought of the satisfaction he would thereby deny his detractors: ‘Living well is the best revenge’, he said. ( in Quotation at page 29)
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George Herbert was a poet, orator, and priest of the Church of England. His poetry is associated with the writings of the metaphysical poets, and he is recognised as "one of the foremost British devotional lyricists." He was born into an artistic and wealthy family and largely raised in England. Wikipedia
Born: 3 April 1593, Montgomery
Died: 1 March 1633, Bemerton, Salisbury
Spouse: Jane Danvers (m. 1629–1633)
Place of burial: St. Andrew's Church, Bemerton, Salisbury
Parents: Magdalen Newport, Richard Herbert of Montgomery Castle
Education: University of Cambridge, Westminster School, Trinity College
Source: George Herbert
https://g.co/kgs/XqnLRU
Portrait by Robert White in 1674 (National Portrait Gallery)
“It is always darkest just before the Day dawneth.”
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Thomas Fuller
A Pisgah-Sight of Palestine and the Confines Thereof, 1650
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“Thomas Fuller was an English churchman and historian, and a prolific writer. The Pisgah in the title of this work was the name of high hill with a commanding view over the Holly Land.
This idea expressed here has become something of a proverbial commonplace, but there is no earlier recorded expression of it. It is unknown whether Fuller coined the phrase or was merely following previously established usage. (In the 1850s, Irish songwriter Samuel Lover claimed, without any supporting evidence, that the expression had been used in Ireland for hundreds of years.)
Among the best-known subsequent versions of the phrase was in ‘Dedicated to the one I Love’, a pop song by Lowman Pauling and Ralph Bass, which was a hit for The Shirelles in 1959 and the Mamas and the Papas in 1967 - ‘The darkest hour is just before dawn’.
It is worth noting that there is no scientific evidence to support this assertion. It is not necessary any darker at this time of the night any other. However, that does not weaken the point, which is metaphorical: it is often just when we think that everything is hopeless that matters begin to improve.”(JP in 1001 Questions at pages 28 - about Death and Life)
1001 Quotations to Inspire your Life
CATEGORY: Movie 🎥
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The Birth of a Nation
D. W. Griffith, 1915
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U. S. (D. W. Griffith & Epoch) 190m Silent BW
Producer: D. W. Griffith Screenplay: Frank E. Woods, D. W. Griffith, from the novel The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan, the novel The Leopard’s Spots, and the play The Clansman by Thomas F.
Dixon Jr. Photography G. W. Bitzer
Music: Joseph Carl Breil, D. W. Griffith
Cast: Lilian Gish, Mae Marsh, Henry B. Walthall, Miriam Cooper, Mary Alden, Ralph Lewis, George Siegmann, Walter Long, Robert Harron, Wallace Reid, Joseph Henabery, Elmer Clifton, Josephine Crowell, Spottiswoode Aitken, George Beranger
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“It is the biggest thing
I have undertaken, but
I shall not be satisfied
until I do something else
. . . I am, like all other
human beings, aiming
at perfection.”
D.W. Griffith, 1915
ℹ️
Griffith’s movie was the first film to be screened in the White House — 1915, for President Woodrow Wilson.
Source: (1001Movies2021)
“I retain’d nothing of France, but the language: My Father and Mother being people of better Fashion, than ordinarily the people call’d Refugees.”
Roxana
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Daniel Defoe
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Lifespan: b. 1660 (England), d. 1731
First Published: 1724
First Published by: T. Warner (London)
Original Title: The Fortunate Mistress
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“While Roxana, Defoe’s last and most complex novel, in less familiar among general readers than Robinson Crusoe, it has been well known to those interested in the development of the novel, because of its frank portrayal of its heroine’s fate - early destitution and the exchanging of her body for food and shelter, her many children and their abandonment, her lovers her failed reformations, and her enormous wealth.
Perhaps more important, however, than this list of sexual, social, and financial adventures is the voice that Defoe lends Roxana. In a notorious scene, Roxana puts her maidservant Amy into bed with her landlord-lover, saying to herself, and to us in effect, “I’m not a wife, but a w***e, and I want my maid to be a w***e to, and yet I am a wife and Amy is not a w***e but a victim, and yet we’ll do it all again”.
Such a voice, both self-estranging and self-engaging, becomes the string on which the events of the novel are strung, including relations with a French Prince, with the King of England, with a leading financial adviser, with an honest Dutch merchant. Scandalously, Roxana gets her children out of the way almost as soon as she has them, but towards the end, her daughter Susan, who has found employment as a servant girl in Roxana’s own house, comes back to haunt her mother with a child’s cry for recognition. Significantly Roxana’s name is also Susan, and in this climax of self-confrontation the novel descents inconclusively towards a final abandonment.”
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THE GREAT TRAIN ROBBERY
Edwin S. Porter, 1903
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U.S. (Edison) 12m Silent BW (hand-colored)
Screenplay: Scott Marble, Edwin S. Porter
Photography: Edwin S. Porter, Blair Smith
Cast: A.C. Abadie, Gilbert M. “Bronco Billy” Anderson, George Barnes, Walter Cameron, Frank Hanaway, Morgan Jones, Tom London, Marie Murray, Mary Snow
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“In every respect we consider is absolutely the superior of any moving picture ever made.”
Edison Company Catalog, 1904
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“Most historians regard The Great Train Robbery as the first Western, initiating a genre that, in few short years, became the most popular in American cinema. Made by the Edison Company in November 1903, The Great Train Robbery was the most commercially successful film of the pre-Griffith period of American cinema and spawned a host of imitations.
What is exceptional about Edwin S. Porter’s film is the degree of narrative sophistication, given the early date. There are over a dozen separate scenes, each further developing the story. In the opening scene, two masked robbers force a telegraph operator to send a false message so that train will make an unscheduled stop. In the next scene, bandits board the train. The robbers enter the mail car, and after a fight, open the safe. In the following scene, two robbers overpower the driver and fireman of the train and throw one of them off. Next, the robbers stop the train and hold up the passengers. One runs away and is shut. The robbers then escape aboard the engine, and in the subsequent scene we see them mount horses and ride off.
Meanwhile, the telegraph operator on the train sends a message calling for assistance. In a saloon, a newcomer is being forced to dance at gunpoint, but when the message arrives everyone grabs their rifles and exits. Cut to the robbers pursued by a posse. There is a shoot-out, and the robbers are killed.
There’s one extra shot, the best known in the film, showing one of the robbers firing point blank out of the screen. This was it seems, sometime shown at the start of the film, sometimes at the end. Either way, it gave the spectator a sense of being directly in the line of fire.
One actor in The Great Train Robbery was G.M. Anderson (real name Max Aronson). Among other parts, he played the passenger who is shot. Anderson was shortly to become the first star of Westerns, appearing as Bronco Billy in over hundred films, beginning in 1907.
In later years some have challenged the claim of The Great Train Robbery to be regarded as the first Western on the grounds that it is not the first or not a Western. It is certainly true that there are earlier films with a Western theme, such as Thomas Edison’s Cripple Creek Bar-Room Scene (1899), but they do not have the fully developed narrative of Porter’s film. It’s also true that it has its roots both in stage plays incorporating spectacular railroad scenes, and in orders films of daring robberies that weren’t Westerns. Nor can its claim to being a true Western be based on authentic locations, because The Great Train Robbery was shot on the Delaware and Lackawanna Railroad in New Jersey. But train robberies, sine the days of Jesse James, had been part of Western lore, and other iconic elements such as six-shooters, cowboy hats, and horses all serve to give the film a genuine Western feel.(EBfilms/23)
