Sublime

How do you choose the doctors, lawyers, plumbers, and car mechanics that you need in your life? You seldom select them on the basis of their technical knowledge or their academic qualifications. Here is the shocking truth: You actually choose them on the basis of their business skills. How they build their practices, how they market themselves, how

But I ask the reader to remember always that I am talking of words, not as they are used in talk or novels, but as they will be used, and have been used, in warrants and certificates, and Acts of Parliament. The distinction between the two is perfectly clear and practical. The difference is that a novelist or a talker can be trusted to try and hit

I believe that behind the art and philosophy of our time there is a considerable element of this bottomless ambition and this unnatural hunger; and since in these last words I am touching only lightly on things that would need much larger treatment, I will admit that the rending of the ancient roof of man is probably only a part of such an endless

Each week, I write my required essay and trudge to my tutorial—a one-on-one session with this or that brilliant and eccentric professor, beginning with the offer of sherry and snuff and ending with the strong suspicion that nothing we’ve just discussed applies to the real world.

Mr Brooke’s conclusions were as difficult to predict as the weather: it was only safe to say that he would act with benevolent intentions, and that he would spend as little money as possible in carrying them out. For the most glutinously indefinite minds enclose some hard grains of habit; and a man has been seen lax about all his own interests exce

Pacioli later called Leonardo the “most worthy of painters, perspectivists, architects and musicians, one endowed with every perfection,” and he recalled “that happy time when we were both in the employ of the most illustrious Duke of Milan, Ludovico Maria Sforza Anglo, in the years of Our Lord 1496 to 1499.”

Fast forward to the Renaissance, and Thomas More was taking quote whoredom to a new level, asking his friend Erasmus to ensure that his book Utopia ‘be handsomely set off with the highest of recommendations, if possible, from several people, both intellectuals and distinguished statesmen’.

House of Lords in England concerning a Church-related matter. Apparently one of the representatives had put forth the argument that it was not proper for a governing body with so many atheists to rule on a religious issue. One of the members rose to the occasion, however, and replied, “Rubbish, Sir! I am quite certain that everyone here believes in