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.
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