Sublime
An inspiration engine for ideas
Epicurus is indeed brave, even if he did wear sleeves.* Courage, hard work, and a mind fit for war can be found among the Persians just as well as among those who wear a belt.
Lucius Annaeus Seneca • Letters on Ethics: To Lucilius (The Complete Works of Lucius Annaeus Seneca)
How to be Roman
Mary Beard • SPQR
The implications of Suillius’ attack were that Seneca was not only very wealthy, but wealthy despite an entirely false claim to be “philosophical,” and wealthy at the expense of other citizens. Legacy-hunting was a common corrupt practice in Rome at the time, memorably depicted in literary texts such as Petronius’ Satyricon, in which the central ch
... See moreEmily Wilson • The Greatest Empire: A Life of Seneca
“It is the superfluous things that wear our togas bare.” The toga itself, he insists in the following letter, must be simple, neither sparkling white nor conspicuously dirty, since wisdom is on the inside, not in a person’s dress. But he also acknowledges that clothing can be an important marker of one’s inner state.
Emily Wilson • The Greatest Empire: A Life of Seneca
Another precedent can be found in Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s The Rivals (1775), one of the most popular plays of the century (and mentioned in Mansfield Park): its upper-class heroine is so entranced by the illicit elopements found in novels that her lover is forced to disguise himself as an illicit poor suitor in order to win her affection.
David M. Shapard • The Annotated Northanger Abbey
Sartre was the bridge to all the traditions that he plundered, modernised, personalised and reinvented. Yet he insisted all his life that what mattered was not the past at all: it was the future. One must keep moving, creating what will be: acting in the world and making a difference to it.
Sarah Bakewell • At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails with Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Others
La salle était pleine de gens connus : les hommes pour leur nom, leurs talents ou leur fortune, les femmes pour leur beauté, leurs bijoux ou leurs amants.
Joseph Kessel • Le tour du malheur (Tome 1) - La Fontaine Médicis - L'Affaire Bernan (French Edition)
when Max one day said, “Jacaranda is the best-dressed woman in Los Angeles,” it came out sounding mean-spirited and vile. The gold had washed off the surface and the Gates of Paradise had been melted down for private purposes no longer on public view. It was only art anyway,
Eve Babitz • Sex and Rage: A Novel
Nul n'est forcé de suivre la Fortune à la course il est déjà beau, sinon de lui résister, du moins de faire halte, de ne point presser le mouvement qui nous emporte.