Sublime

This spending of the best part of one’s life earning money in order to enjoy a questionable liberty during the least valuable part of it reminds me of the Englishman who went to India to make a fortune first, in order that he might return to England and live the life of a poet.

Il menait sa vie d’aventure sans nul souci des convenances. Devant son mépris des périls et ce rire qui lui venait si facilement, l’existence cessait d’être une succession d’efforts et de contraintes pénibles, et devenait un hochet avec lequel on pouvait jouer de toutes les manières avec insouciance et pour son plus grand plaisir, puis jeter néglig

You could sit up as late as you pleased, and, whenever you got up, go abroad without any landlord or house-lord dogging you for rent. Many a man is harassed to death to pay the rent of a larger and more luxurious box who would not have frozen to death in such a box as this.

I was open to be convinced by the evidence of my eyes, rather than by the teachings of those who had not seen, or by the words of those who had seen and gone before.

His singleminded approach was so successful that he was able to buy into the Harkness family business within a few years, and shortly afterward made the acquaintance of one of his Cleveland counterparts in the grain-brokerage chain, one John D. Rockefeller.

He was coauthor of a textbook, Principles of Zoology, his first American work, which went through sixteen editions

As his five-dollar name suggests, Roosevelt was the scion of the Atlantic elite. He was born into the New York aristocracy—his father helped found the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the American Museum of Natural History. Educated at Harvard and a rising star in the world of reform politics, “Thee,” as he signed his letters, was as pedigreed an eas