Sublime

GREED.

Look up “villain,” for instance, and you’ll be awash in such rascality as only a lexicographer could conjure back from centuries of iniquity, obliquity, depravity, knavery, profligacy, frailty, flagrancy, infamy, immorality, corruption, wickedness, wrongdoing, backsliding and sin. You’ll find ruffians and riffraff, miscreants and malefactors, repro

Your fifth option is to drop a couple of hints and get in on the action. Maybe you actually want to join in the fun; maybe you just want a little off the top of the other guy’s kickback, in exchange for keeping your mouth shut. I don’t like money enough to sell myself for it, and I don’t like anything enough to tie my life to some scumbag who’s alr

In 1681 the directorship was taken over by the recklessly aggressive Sir Josiah Child, who had started his career supplying beer to the navy in Portsmouth, and who was described by the diarist John Evelyn as ‘an overgrown and suddenly monied man … most sordidly avaricious’.81

Between recklessness and cowardice lies courage, for example; and the generous man is neither profligate nor cheap. Each virtue oversees an action or emotion for which it finds an intermediate path. The brave experience fear “at the right times, with reference to the right objects, towards the right people, with the right motive, and in the right w

probity,

Teofrasto12 nel confrontare tra di loro, come si fa di solito, i peccati, afferma da buon filosofo13 che piú gravi sono quelli di desiderio che non quelli generati da ira, e ciò perché un uomo, vinto dall’ira, s’è allontanato dalla ragione, non senza dolore e occulto spasimo14, mentre colui che pecca per desiderio, dominato dal piacere, si dimostra