Sublime

“Every man alone is sincere. At the entrance of a second person, hypocrisy begins. We parry and fend the approach of our fellow-man by compliments, by gossip, by amusements, by affairs. We cover up our thought from him under a hundred folds. I knew a man who under a certain religious frenzy cast off this drapery, and omitting all compliment and com

What defined this group of premodern heroes was their ability to awaken heroic instincts in others, and to channel these toward the comprehension and the realization of order, hierarchy, harmony, beauty, and justice.

lectures by the philosopher Charles Peirce,

The one essential of an aristocracy is to be in advance of its age. That is, there must be something new known to a few. There must be a password; and it must always be a new password.

Marcus Aurelius, the great Roman Emperor, said: "A man's life is what his thoughts make of it."

A true friend of man; almost the only friend of human progress. An Old Mortality, say rather an Immortality, with unwearied patience and faith making plain the image engraven in men’s bodies, the God of whom they are but defaced and leaning monuments.

Ralph Waldo Emerson said this: "A man is what he thinks about, all day long."

All men are ordinary men; the extraordinary men are those who know it.

submit that this is what the real, no‑bullshit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out.⁠6 Wallace’s p