Beautiful Lives

One of my favorite quotations comes from Ralph Waldo Emerson, speaking of Plutarch's Lives of Illustrious Men  --

Go with mean people and you think life is mean. Then read Plutarch, and the world is a proud place, peopled with men of positive quality, with heroes and demigods standing around us, who will not let us sleep.

(quoted on p. 1 of Edmund Grindlay Berry, Emerson's Plutarch. (Cambridge 1961)).

Plutarch himself wrote of his biographical work --

                It was for the sake of others that I first began to write biographies, but I find myself                 continuing to do it for my own.  The virtues of these great men serve me as a sort of                     looking glass in which I may see how to adorn and adjust my own life.  I can compare it                 to nothing but daily living with them . . . turning my thoughts happily and calmly to the                 noble.