Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8

I do not think it possible for a better man to be injured by a worse.... To a good man nothing is evil, neither while living nor when dead, nor are his concerns neglected by the...

Socrates was surely not a good provider, but if he had provided more for his family, he would have provided less for the world. The wealthy Crito would have turned his pockets i...

Augustus reigned forty-four years, and it was in the twenty-seventh year of his reign that there was born in Bethlehem of Judæa a Babe who was to revolutionize the calendar. The...

Agrippina was a niece of Claudius, and such marriages were considered unnatural; but Agrippina had subtly shown that, the deceased Emperor being her brother, she already had a s...

And so we find Aristo, aged seventeen, tall and straight and bronzed, starting off for Athens, his worldly goods rolled up in a bearskin, tied about with thongs. There is a lege...

Socrates discovered the principle of human liberty; he taught the rights of the individual, and as these threatened to interfere with the State, the politicians got alarmed and...

Another teacher that Marcus had was Rusticus, a blunt old farmer turned pedagog, who has added a word to our language. His pupils were called Rusticana, and later plain rustics....

What more dost thou want when thou hast done a man a service? Art thou not content that thou hast done something conformable to thy nature, and dost thou seek to be paid for it?...

As for lawyers, our little philosopher considered them, for the most part, sharks and wreckers. A lawyer looks over an estate, not with the idea of keeping it intact, but of dis...

We look in vain for college pranks, and some of those absurd and foolish things in which young men delight. We wish he could unbend, and be indiscreet, or even impolite, just to...

Preachers and priests in the employ of a denomination are attorneys for the defense. God is not found in a theological seminary, for very seldom is the seminary seminal--it galv...

The Jewish religion is a concrete, unbroken mass of laws. The Jew is bounded on the east by law; on the north by law; on the west by law; on the south by law. There are set rule...

Five men made up the Barbizon school of painting, which has influenced the entire art education of the world. And that those who have been influenced and helped most, deny their...

The Martineaus were of good old Huguenot stock, and the French language came easy to Harriet. For the plain people of France she had a profound regard, and being sort of a revol...

In only one thing did the boy really excel, and that was in the matter of making rhymes. The Abbe Chateauneuf had taught him the trick before he could speak plainly, and Ninon h...

The snug little sum he had secured in England would have shown his ability, but there was something better in store, awaiting his return to France. It seems the Controller of Fi...

His next financial venture, begun when he was sixty-eight, might well have tested the strength of a much younger man. A few miles from Geneva, at Ferney, just over the border fr...

Herbert Spencer and Mary Ann Evans first met at the house of the editor of the "Westminster Review" about the year Eighteen Hundred Fifty-one. Their tastes, aptitudes and inclin...

Herbert Spencer had no titles nor degrees--he belonged to no sect, party, nor society. Practically, he had no recognition in England until after he was sixty years of age. Ameri...

A single room in a lodging-house sufficed, and this room always had the appearance of being occupied by a transient. He had few books, accumulated no belongings in way of domest...

John Thoreau was assisted in the pencil-making by the whole family. The Thoreaus used to sell their pencils down at Cambridge, fifteen miles away, and Harvard professors, for th...

Stripped of the fact that a man of culture and education built the shanty and lived in it, the incident is scarcely worth noting. Boys passing through the shanty stage, all buil...