And in our soundbite world, the pithy statement is pretty much now king. Of course, there is nothing modern about the mighty maxim - it can be found scattered throughout the ancient as well as more recent literature.
In my travels, I keep an eye out for succinct sayings that help me describe or understand the process of analyzing and recording personal history. And this week, I am going to share some of them.
The first group of video biography related quotations apply to the question of why a person should bother recording a life story or creating a video biography in the first place:
The words a parent speaks to children in the privacy of the home are not overheard at the time, but, as in whispering galleries, they will be clearly heard at the end and by posterity. (Richter)
Life must be lived forwards, but can only be understood backwards. (Kierkegaard)
The words of the wise are as goads. (Ecclesiastes)
There is properly no history, only biography. (Emerson)
Silence is the virtue of fools. (Frances Bacon)
Read no history; nothing but biography, for that is life without theory. (Disraeli)
The good things which belong to prosperity are to be wished, but the good things that belong to adversity are to be admired. (Seneca)
The only end of writing is to enable the readers to enjoy life or better to endure it. (Dr. Johnson)
My second group of life story quotations go to the sheer difficulty of the task of the personal historian and our impudence in even attempting the task: how do you squeeze a whole life into a relatively short work of biography?
It is a great fault, in descriptive poetry, to describe everything. (Pope)
Communication of all kinds is like painting - a compromise with impossibilities. (Samuel Butler)
One always has to spoil a picture a little bit, in order to finish it. (Delacroix)
A little inaccuracy sometimes saves tons of explanation. (Saki)
It requires an impartial person to make a good historian; but it is the partial and one-sided who hunt out the materials. (Acton)
This third group of quotations inspires me to create something unique and even fun in my personal history and video biographies:
If you can speak what you never hear, if you can write what you will never read, you have done a rare thing. (Thoreau)
The art of Biography
Is different to Geography.
Geography is about maps,
But biography is about chaps. (Bentley)
Unmitigated seriousness is always out of place in human affairs...it was Plato, in his solemn old age, who said it. (Santayana)
The fourth group of quotations help inspire my video biography work and relate to the (very rare) difficult client or the (ditto) difficult subject:
Offensive objects, at a proper distance, acquire even a degree of beauty. (Shenstone)
One is never satisfied with the portrait of a person one knows. (Goethe)
It would be a good thing if man concerned himself more with the history of his nature than with the history of his deeds. (Hebbel)
Happy the people whose annals are boring to read. (Montesquieu)
Her funeral sermon (which was long
And followed by a sacred song)
Mentioned her virtues, it is true,
But dwelt upon her vices too. (Belloc)
Children begin by loving their parents. After a time they judge them. Rarely, if ever, do they forgive them. (Wilde)
Fifth, there are the clever personal history quotations that are just too true to go without:
The whole scheme of things is turned wrong end to. Life should begin with age and its privileges and accumulations, and end with youth and its capacity to splendidly enjoy such advantages. (Twain)
The true index of a man's character is the health of his wife. (Connolly)
What is it about the bon mot and biography? Why is it that generations of writers and polymaths keep returning to the subject of biography and why is it that their output engenders such an interest in us?
Jane Lehmann-Shafron co-founded Your Story Here Video Biography, a documentary production company that specializes in video biographies. Based in Orange County CA, her award-winning films have been featured in festivals in the United States and Canada. She can be contacted on 949-742-2755 or through her website.
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