Biography Important Quotes

Every great man nowadays has his disciples, and it is usually Judas who writes the biography.

Another new and groundbreaking story in FDR Unmasked is about his highly consequential friendship with Vincent Astor, the closest with any man in his adult life. To truly understand the “real” Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the one behind his mask of deception, it is important to understand their almost brotherly relationship.

Was Ali a poor, illiterate, village boy when he met Wallace, as has generally been believed? Or, did he have an important and interesting backstory?

What I think is important is to appreciate every bit of happiness that comes your way, not to wait to celebrate the big happiness when it comes, but the more frequent little happinesses.

Each holiday tradition acts as an exercise in cognitive development, a greater challenge for the child. Despite the fact most parents don't recognize this function, they still practice the exercise. Rant also saw how resolving the illusions is crucial to how the child uses any new skills. A child who is never coached with Santa Claus may never develop an ability to imagine. To him, nothing exists except the literal and tangible. A child who is disillusioned abruptly, by his peers or siblings, being ridiculed for his faith and imagination, may choose never to believe in anything- tangible or intangible- again. To never trust or wonder. But a child who relinquishes the illusions of Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy, that child may come away with the most important skill set. That child may recognize the strength of his own imagination and faith. He will embrace the ability to create his own reality. That child becomes his own authority. He determines the nature of his world. His own vision. And by doing so, by the power of his example, he determines the reality of the other two types: those who can't imagine, and those who can't trust.

We thought speaking in English meant you were more intelligent. We were wrong of course. It does not matter what language you choose, the important thing is the words you use to express yourself.

Why does a man’s desire supersede my right to dignity? What makes certain men think their perversions are more important than a girl’s right to exist as a free human in society?

[Schulz] came to see that the better part of his shyness was really vanity, or self-centeredness. "Shyness is an illusion," he would say, late in life. "If you get out and do something and talk to people, you don't have to be shy. Shyness is the overtly self-conscious thinking that you are the only person in the world; that how you look and what you do is of any importance.

I sat wondering: Why is there always this deep shade of melancholy over the fields arid river banks, the sky and the sunshine of our country? And I came to the conclusion that it is because with us Nature is obviously the more important thing. The sky is free, the fields limitless; and the sun merges them into one blazing whole. In the midst of this, man seems so trivial. He comes and goes, like the ferry-boat, from this shore to the other; the babbling hum of his talk, the fitful echo of his song, is heard; the slight movement of his pursuit of his own petty desires is seen in the world's market-places: but how feeble, how temporary, how tragically meaningless it all seems amidst the immense aloofness of the Universe! The contrast between the beautiful, broad, unalloyed peace of Nature—calm, passive, silent, unfathomable,—and our own everyday worries—paltry, sorrow-laden, strife-tormented, puts me beside myself as I keep staring at the hazy, distant, blue line of trees which fringe the fields across the river. Where Nature is ever hidden, and cowers under mist and cloud, snow and darkness, there man feels himself master; he regards his desires, his works, as permanent; he wants to perpetuate them, he looks towards posterity, he raises monuments, he writes biographies; he even goes the length of erecting tombstones over the dead. So busy is he that he has not time to consider how many monuments crumble, how often names are forgotten!

Il y a ceux qui n'ont jamais lu et qui s'en font une honte, ceux qui n'ont plus le temps de lire et qui en cultivent le regret, il y a ceux qui ne lisent pas de romans, mais des livres *utiles*, mais des essais, mais des ouvrages techniques, mais des biographies, mais des livres d'histoire, il y a ceux qui lisent tout et n'importe quoi, ceux qui "dévorent" et dont les yeux brillent, il y a ceux qui ne lisent que les classiques, monsieur, "car il n'est meilleur critique que le tamis du temps", ceux qui passent leur maturité à "relire", et ceux qui ont lu le dernier untel et le dernier tel autre, car il faut bien, monsieur, se tenir au courant... Mais tous, tous, au nom de la nécessité de lire. Le dogme. (p. 78-79)

Something that once had importance might be forgotten by most people but because millions of people once knew it, a force is present that can be harnessed. There might be so much significance attached to a song, for example, or a fact, that it can’t die but only lies dormant, like a vampire in his coffin, waiting to be called forth from the grave once again. There is more magic in the fact that the first mass worldwide photo of the Church of Satan was taken by Joe Rosenthal – the same man who took the most famous news photo in history – the flag-raising at Iwo Jima. There’s real occult significance to that – much more than in memorizing grimoires and witches’ alphabets. People ask me about what music to use in rituals – what is the best occult music. I’ve instructed people to go to the most uncrowded section of the music store and it’s a guarantee what you’ll find there will be occult music. That’s the power of long-lost trivia. I get irritated by people who turn up their noses and whine ‘Why would anyone want to know that?’ Because once upon a time, everyone in America knew it. Suppose there’s a repository of neglected energy, that’s been generated and forgotten. Maybe it’s like a pressure cooker all this time, just waiting for someone to trigger its release. ‘Here I am,’ it beckons, ‘I have all this energy stored up just waiting for you – all you have to do is unlock the door. Because of man’s stupidity, he’s neglected me to this state of somnambulism – dreaming the ancient dreams – even though I was once so important to him.’ Think about that. A song that was once on millions of lips now is only on your lips. Now what does that contain? Those vibrations of that particular tune, what do they evoke, call up? What do they unlock? The old gods lie dormant, waiting.

Persistence is very important. You should not give up unless you are forced to give up.” No doubt, entering space is an unforgiving business to deal with but Musk mastered it. His biggest advice is to, “really pay attention to negative feedback and actively solicit it, particularly from friends... hardly anyone does that. It's incredibly helpful.

Why, it seemed to me I had lost the most of myself; and there was left only a brain which played with ideas, and a body that went delicately down pleasant ways. And I could not believe as my fellows believed, nor could I love them, nor could I detect anything in aught they said or did save their exceeding folly: for I had lost their cordial common faith of what use they made of half-hours and months and years... I had lost faith in the importance of my own actions, too. There was a little time of which the passing might be made endurable; beyond gaped unpredictable darkness: and that was all there was of certainty anywhere.

Perhaps more important, it also showed that you could get away with being a little dangerous, provocative, or just plain deep if you did it with a smile on your face and remembered that entertainment always came first. When done right, it’s possible to be silly and subversive at the same time.

There is always a danger that those who are less obviously and traditionally important, prominent, or powerful will be left out of the history of human experience.

It is testimony to the importance of beer in their story that the brewery was the first permanent building the Pilgrims constructed.

As I try to zero in on what’s important for the Muppets,” Jim said years later, “I think it’s a sense of innocence, naiveté—you know, the experience of a simple person meeting life.” The

She did not approach Caesar wrapped in a carpet, she was not a seductress, she did not use her charm to persuade the men in her life to lose their judgement, and she did not die by the bite of an asp…Yet other important elements of her career have been bypassed in the post-antique recension: she was a Skilled naval commander, a published medical authority, and an expert royal administrator who was met with adulation throughout the eastern Mediterranean, perhaps seen by some as a messianic figure, the hope for a future Eastern Mediterranean free of Roman domination.

Robin’s experience is his love for his fellow man. He was in the fortunate position of having plenty of money, yet it wasn’t just money that he was willing to give away; he gave something far more important – his time and energy. There is little doubt that, were he still alive, he would be planning more ways to help those in need. Whether rich or poor, we can all do more than we do to help others.

It may be remarked, however, that, of all the events which constitute a person’s biography, there is scarcely one — none, certainly, of anything like a similar importance — to which the world so easily reconciles itself as to his death.

Grant was forty-two and Lee fifty-seven, Grant at the peak of health and energy, while Lee feared his weakening body and lagging faculties. Each was defending his notion of home. Grant by now was the most popular man in the Union, arguably more so even than Lincoln. Lee was easily the most important man in the Confederacy, his popularity and influence, had he chosen to use it, far outstripping Davis’s. Unquestionably, they were at this moment the preeminent military figures in America, and arguably the world.

He had three great loves, his wife, his dogs, and his home. He wrote about them over and over again. And though literary critics say he was a patently unimportant writer and they probably are right, he accomplished something that very few important writers are able to do: in some ineffable way he transmuted his great loves into the hearts of other people so that they loved them almost as intensely as he did. So that now, long after he has gone, along with his wife, and the dogs, the strange love still remains.

if something is at stake, the human mind gets ignited and the working capacity gets enhanced manifold. This is one of the techniques of building talent. It is important to work hard towards your chosen path—success is more a function of effort than anything else. A

The seeds of our own destruction are often sown at birth or in childhood. We are too busy acquiring knowledge and living life to notice their presence. It is for our biographers, if we are of sufficient importance to have any, to highlight them to a post-mortem audience.

I realized that if something is at stake, the human mind gets ignited and the working capacity gets enhanced manifold. This is one of the techniques of building talent. It is important to work hard towards your chosen path—success is more a function of effort than anything else.

Under Cruyff, dominating the ball became the first and most important rule. ‘If you have the ball, the opposition doesn’t have it and can’t attack you,’ Cruyff would repeat daily. So the job became finding the players who could keep possession and also doing a lot of positional work in training.

His radicalism took many forms. A vegetarian, he founded a commune, Fruitlands, so extreme in its Utopianism that members neither wore wool nor used animal manures, as both were considered property of the beasts from which they came. One reason the venture failed in its first winter was that when canker worms got into the apple crop, the nonviolent Fruitlanders refused to take measures to kill them. The Mr. March of Little Women departs from Bronson Alcott’s biography in many important respects. Bronson was an educator, not a minister of religion (he is credited with inventing the concept of recess, and also for attempting one of the first racially integrated classrooms).

That exploration of faith would become an important aspect of the series, embodied in the relationship between the pious Shepherd Book and the lapsed believer Mal Reynolds. Captain Reynolds “is a man who has learned that when he believed in something it destroyed him,” Joss said. “So what he believes in is the next job, the next paycheck and keeping his crew safe.” The series pushes past the idea that a belief in God is necessary for a moral life, and questions the definition of morality that others want to impose. Mal, to Joss, is a “guy who looks into the void and sees nothing but the void—and says there is no moral structure, there is no help, no one’s coming, no one gets it, I have to do it.

Graham spoke plainly and directly. Convinced that the average person had a working vocabulary of six hundred words, he made a point to stick with common words and short sentences. Though he never put it exactly this way, he instinctively grasped the import of Sister Aimee Semple McPherson’s recipe for rabbit stew: first “you have to catch the rabbit.

Harlow's results showed that a mother's reassuring gentle touch —what Harlow called "contact comfort"—is a more important factor in an infant's world than food. The journalist Deborah Blum, in her excellent biography of Harlow, Love at Goon Park, summarizes his initial findings: that for a baby primate, "food is sustenance but a good hug is life itself.

Dr. Chanter, in his brilliant History of Human Thought in the Twentieth Century, has made the suggestion that only a very small proportion of people are capable of acquiring new ideas of political or social behaviour after they are twenty-five years old. On the other hand, few people become directive in these matters until they are between forty and fifty. Then they prevail for twenty years or more. The conduct of public affairs therefore is necessarily twenty years or more behind the living thought of the times. This is what Dr. Chanter calls the "delayed realisation of ideas". In the less hurried past this had not been of any great importance, but in the violent crises of the Revolutionary Period it became a primary fact. It is evident now that whatever the emergency, however obvious the new problem before our species in the nineteen-twenties, it was necessary for the whole generation that had learned nothing and could learn nothing from the Great War and its sequelae, to die out before any rational handling of world affairs could even begin. The cream of the youth of the war years had been killed; a stratum of men already middle-aged remained in control, whose ideas had already set before the Great War. It was, says Chanter, an inescapable phase. The world of the Frightened Thirties and the Brigand Forties was under the dominion of a generation of unteachable, obstinately obstructive men, blinded men, miseducating, misleading the baffled younger people for completely superseded ends. If they could have had their way, they would have blinded the whole world for ever. But the blinding was inadequate, and by the Fifties all this generation and its teachings and traditions were passing away, like a smoke-screen blown aside. Before a few years had passed it was already incredible that in the twenties and thirties of the twentieth century the whole political life of the world was still running upon the idea of competitive sovereign empires and states. Men of quite outstanding intelligence were still planning and scheming for the "hegemony" of Britain or France or Germany or Japan; they were still moving their armies and navies and air forces and making their combinations and alliances upon the dissolving chess-board of terrestrial reality. Nothing happened as they had planned it; nothing worked out as they desired; but still with a stupefying inertia they persisted. They launched armies, they starved and massacred populations. They were like a veterinary surgeon who suddenly finds he is operating upon a human being, and with a sort of blind helplessness cuts and slashes more and more desperately, according to the best equestrian rules. The history of European diplomacy between 1914 and 1944 seems now so consistent a record of incredible insincerity that it stuns the modern mind. At the time it seemed rational behaviour. It did not seem insincere. The biographical material of the period -- and these governing-class people kept themselves in countenance very largely by writing and reading each other's biographies -- the collected letters, the collected speeches, the sapient observations of the leading figures make tedious reading, but they enable the intelligent student to realise the persistence of small-society values in that swiftly expanding scene. Those values had to die out. There was no other way of escaping from them, and so, slowly and horribly, that phase of the moribund sovereign states concluded.

. . . the most important thing to remember about science is the fact that it is supposed to be fun. . . . Doing nothing—in a pleasant sort of way—was always considered in Europe a perfectly respectable way of spending one’s time,” he said, voicing his own predilection. “Here in America you are expected to keep busy all the time—it does not matter so much what you are doing as long as you are doing it fast.

Equally important was the approach of the advertising, which can be summarized with a single word: “minimalist.” “Billy Graham, Harringay Arena, 7: 30 Every Night.” Or “Hear Billy Graham.” Or just “Billy Graham,” with his photo. Crusade organizers took a cue from advertisements for Cadillacs in the United States. They gave just enough information to arouse curiosity, implying that the product was so desirable it sold itself.

Bowie sat down for an interview with his Hunger costar Susan Sarandon and explained, “When you’re young and you’re determined to crack the big dream of ‘I have a big statement and the world needs to hear my statement,’ there’s something a bit irresponsible about your attitude to the future. A nonrecognition that the future exists. I think it’s important for youth to have that. My son keeps me remembering that there is a tomorrow.

There are numerous biographies of Woolf. Biography has been highly influential in shaping the reception ofWoolf ’s work, and her life has been as much debated as her writing. I would recommend the following three which represent three different biographical contexts and a range of positions on Woolf ’s life: Quentin Bell’s Virginia Woolf: A Biography (1972), Hermione Lee’s Virginia Woolf (1996), and Julia Briggs’s Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life (2005). There is no one, true biography of Woolf (as, indeed, there cannot be of any subject of biography), but these three mark important phases in the writing and rewriting of Woolf ’s life. Hot debate continues over how biographers represent her mental health, her sexuality, her politics, her suicide, and of course her art, and over how we are to understand the latter in relation to all the former points of contention.

Woolf drew on her memories of her holidays in Cornwall for To the Lighthouse, which was conceived in part as an elegy on her parents. Her father was a vigorous walker and an Alpinist of some renown, a member of the Alpine Club and editor of the Alpine Journal from 1868 to 1872; he was the first person to climb the Schreckhorn in the Alps and he wrote on Alpine pleasures in The Playground of Europe (1871). By the time he married Julia Duckworth in 1878, however, a more sedentary Leslie Stephen was the established editor of the Cornhill Magazine, from which he later resigned to take up the editorship of the Dictionary of National Biography in 1882, the year of Woolf ’s birth. Stephen laboured on this monumental Victorian enterprise until 1990, editing single-handed the first twenty-six volumes and writing well over 300 biographical entries. He also published numerous volumes of criticism, the most important of which were on eighteenth-century thought and literature.

All too frequently we take a different view of our trials and temptations. We tend to see them as isolated nightmares. God, however, sees them from a different perspective. They are important and connected punctuation marks in the biography of grace He is writing in our lives. They give formation, direction, and character to our lives. They are all part of the tapestry He is weaving in history. He uses them to build up our strength and to prepare us to surmount greater obstacles, perhaps fiercer temptations.

Thus, the person of experience and reflection writes history. Anyone who has not experienced life on a greater and higher level than everyone else will not know how to interpret the greatness and loftiness of the past. The utterance of the past is always an oracular pronouncement. You will understand it only as builders of the future and as people who know about the present. People now explain the extraordinarily deep and far-reaching effect of Delphi by the particular fact that the Delphic priests had precise knowledge about the past. It is appropriate now to understand that only the man who builds the future has a right to judge the past. In order to look ahead, set yourselves an important goal, and at the same time control that voluptuous analytical drive with which you now lay waste the present and render almost impossible all tranquility, all peaceful growth and maturing. Draw around yourself the fence of a large and extensive hope, an optimistic striving. Create in yourselves a picture to which the future is to correspond, and forget the myth that you are epigones. You have enough to plan and to invent when you imagine that future life for yourselves. But in considering history do not ask that she show you the 'How?' and the 'With what?' If, however, you live your life in the history of great men, then you will learn from history the highest command: to become mature and to flee away from that paralyzing and prohibiting upbringing of the age, which sees advantages for itself in not allowing you to become mature, in order to rule and exploit you, the immature. And when you ask after biographies, then do not ask for those with the refrain 'Mr. Soandso and His Age' but for those whose title page must read 'A Fighter Against His Age.' Fill your souls with Plutarch, and dare to believe in yourselves when you have faith in his heroes. With a hundred people raised in such an unmodern way, that is, people who have become mature and familiar with the heroic, one could permanently silence the entire noisy pseudo-education of this age.

Nor are his purely intellectual merits by any means to be despised. He has, in many respects, clarified Plato's teaching; he has developed, with as much consistency as possible, the type of theory advocated by him in common with many others. His arguments against materialism are good, and his whole conception of the relation of soul and body is clearer than that of Plato or Aristotle. Like Spinoza, he has a certain kind of moral purity and loftiness, which is very impressive. He is always sincere, never shrill or censorious, invariably concerned to tell the reader, as simply as he can, what he believes to be important. Whatever one may think of him as a theoretical philosopher, it is impossible not to love him as a man. The life of Plotinus is known, so far as it is known, through the biography written by his friend and disciple Porphyry, a Semite whose real name was Malchus. There are, however, miraculous elements in this account, which make it difficult to place a complete reliance upon its more credible portions. Plotinus considered his spatio-temporal appearance

Most of the Israelites chose to stay in Babylon, where they would make an important contribution to the Hebrew scriptures. The returning exiles brought home nine scrolls that traced the history of their people from the creation until their deportation: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings; they also brought anthologies of the oracles of the prophets (neviim) and a hymn book, which included new psalms composed in Babylon. It was still not complete, but the exiles had in their possession the bare bones of the Hebrew Bible.

July 7, 1986: Montreux It is only now that I realize the importance of a biography. I mean I always have realized that I enjoy to read (and have learned many things from) the biographies of artists whom I admire. It is probably my main source of education. In the beginning of my “career” (what an awful word) I was misled by a teacher who thought the things I was writing to be pretentious and self important. Years later, when I read those things I wrote in 1978, it didn’t seem so pretentious for almost everything I wrote about “wanting to do,” I actually did in the four or five years that followed.

I always thought of myself as a humanities person as a kid, but I liked electronics,” he said. “Then I read something that one of my heroes, Edwin Land of Polaroid, said about the importance of people who could stand at the intersection of humanities and sciences, and I decided that’s what I wanted to do.” It was as if he were suggesting themes for his biography (and in this instance, at least, the theme turned out to be valid). The creativity that can occur when a feel for both the humanities and the sciences combine in one strong personality was the topic that most interested me in my biographies of Franklin and Einstein, and I believe that it will be a key to creating innovative economies in the twenty-first century.

Looking back, Colleen and Neal have somewhat different perspectives. . . . She remembers she "was impressed that he seemed to have so much charisma. People were looking to him for answers and just had a great regard for him." Then Neal adds, "So much charisma [that] she turned me down when I first asked her for a date." Fortunately for both, he called again, and this time she said yes. . . . Colleen found herself increasingly drawn to him. She found him "really cute and interesting," even if he did lack just a little social polish. He didn't care for dancing and didn't like small talk, both of which were more important to other people than they were to her. He "was so knowledgeable and such a good speaker, even though he did talk fast. But if you could listen fast you could learn a lot." As Neal came to know her better, he was impressed with her maturity, her sensitivity to other people, and the depth of her spiritual convictions. He began feeling a "spiritual impetus that this was a young woman out of the ordinary." . . . Emma remembered, "Our first introduction to Colleen was when you came home one night and said, 'I've got to see more of that girl. She has some thinking under her hood.'" . . . "I knew I was not dealing with an eighteen-year-old co-ed who was so anxious to please me that I'd have my way when I shouldn't," he said. "We hadn't been married long before I knew I had a kind of Gibraltar--someone who would be tough and strong in the storms of life.

In an editorial headlined “The King Is Dead,” The New York Times noted, “Even among the hierarchy of great motion-picture stars, of whom there were many in the happy years of his ascendance, he was acknowledged supreme. Perhaps he was not the most skillful and subtle in the way of technique. Perhaps he did not possess the polish of some of the latterly imported British stars. But what Gable had in a measure that no other star quite matched—or projected as ferociously as he did—was a true masculine personality. Whatever the role, Gable was as certain as the sunrise. He was consistently and stubbornly all Man….People everywhere—men, women and small boys—admired Clark Gable. He was a conspicuous symbol of the rugged American throughout the world.

Many Ottomans of this period viewed life as a perennial tug-of-war between modernity and tradition. In several important ways, Salonica tilted toward the former. The city sported bustling Western-style cafés serving Viennese beer; literary clubs hosting philosophical debates; theaters staging dramas, comedies, and operettas; numerous institutions of learning; and a sizable and vibrant European community. Altogether, Salonica had undergone a major transformation during the reform era and had begun to look like a Western European city. The Muslim community, and especially its progressive Dönme component, had established the most advanced schools in the empire. Young Mustafa, who had ample opportunity to contrast the old and the new, chose to embrace modernity wholeheartedly.

Catherine Elizabeth MiddlEton, Kate, Waity Katie, Sizzler Sister, the Duchess of Cambridge, the High Street Duchess. The woman who has held all of these titles is fonder of some than of others, but it is important to remember that, over the years, each of these names has been bestowed on her by someone else. Because she is a naturally private person, others have often projected an image onto her, associated with one of these names, which is completely at odds with who she really is. Underneath, she has remained the same person throughout, and that person remains something of an enigma. For over ten years she has been the person closest to the man who will one day be king, but she only slowly slipped into the public's consciousness, like the royal family's stealth missile.

There are other star players in the field of gene editing. Most of them deserve to be the focus of biographies or perhaps even movies. (The elevator pitch: A Beautiful Mind meets Jurassic Park.) They play important roles in this book, because I want to show that science is a team sport. But I also want to show the impact that a persistent, sharply inquisitive, stubborn, and edgily competitive player can have. With a smile that sometimes (but not always) masks the wariness in her eyes, Jennifer Doudna turned out to be a great central character. She has the instincts to be collaborative, as any scientist must, but ingrained in her character is a competitive streak, which most great innovators have. With her emotions usually carefully controlled, she wears her star status lightly.

The predominant thoughts and feelings of a pregnant woman are lodged in some of the major chakras of the unborn baby. They will therefore affect the character of the unborn baby. To produce better babies, it is very important for a pregnant woman to see and hear things that are beautiful, inspiring, and strong. The feelings and thoughts should be harmonious and progressive or positive. Anger, pessimism, hopelessness, injurious words, negative feelings and thoughts should be avoided. It is advisable for a pregnant mother to read books that are inspirational like the biographies of great yogis or great people, books on spiritual teachings, mathematics, sciences, business and languages. All of these will have beneficial effects on the unborn baby and will tend to make the baby not only spiritual, but also sharp-minded and practical.

The Portal Potion Success! After weeks and weeks of trying, I’ve finally discovered the correct ingredients for the potion I’d hoped to create for my son! With just a few drops, the potion turns any written work into a portal to the world it describes. Even with my ability to create portals to and from the Otherworld, I never thought it would be possible to create a substance that allowed me passage to any world I wished. My son will get to see the places and meet the characters he’s spent his whole childhood dreaming about! And best of all, I’ll get to watch his happiness soar as it happens! The ingredients are much simpler than I imagined, but difficult to obtain. Their purposes are more metaphysical than practical, so it took some imagination to get the concoction right. The first requirement is a branch from the oldest tree in the woods. To bring the pages to life, I figured the potion would need the very thing that brought the paper to life in the first place. And what else has more life than an ancient tree? The second ingredient is a feather from the finest pheasant in the sky. This will guarantee your potion has no limits, like a bird in flight. It will ensure you can travel to lands far and wide, beyond your imagination. The third component is a liquefied lock and key that belonged to a true love. Just as this person unlocked your heart to a life of love, it will open the door of the literary dimensions your heart desires to experience. The fourth ingredient is two weeks of moonlight. Just as the moon causes waves in the ocean, the moonlight will stir your potion to life. Last, but most important, give the potion a spark of magic to activate all the ingredients. Send it a beam of joy straight from your heart. The potion does not work on any biographies or history books, but purely on works that have been imagined. Now, I must warn about the dangers of entering a fictional world: 1. Time only exists as long as the story continues. Be sure to leave the book before the story ends, or you may disappear as the story concludes. 2. Each world is made of only what the author describes. Do not expect the characters to have any knowledge of our world or the Otherworld. 3. Beware of the story’s villains. Unlike people in our world or the Otherworld, most literary villains are created to be heartless and stripped of all morals, so do not expect any mercy should you cross paths with one. 4. The book you choose to enter will act as your entrance and exit. Be certain nothing happens to it; it is your only way out. The

And I *know* I wrote in the above that I hate biographies and reviews that focus on the psychological, surface detail, especially when they pertain to women writers, because I think it’s really about the cult of the personality, which is essentially problematic, and I think simplistically psychologizing which biographies are so wont to do is really problematic, and dangerous, especially when dealing with complicated women who just by being writers at a certain time and age were labelled as nonconformist, or worse, hysterical or ill or crazy, and I think branding these women as femme fatales is all so often done. And I know in a way I’m contributing to this by posting their bad-ass photos, except hopefully I am humanizing them and thinking of them as complicated selves and intellects AND CELEBRATING THEM AS WRITERS as opposed to straight-up objectifying. One particular review long ago in Poetry that really got my goat was when Brian Phillips used Gertrude Stein’s line about Djuna Barnes having nice ankles as an opener in a review of her poetry, and to my mind it was meant to be entirely dismissive, as of course, Stein was being as well. Stein was many important revolutionary things to literature, but a champion of her fellow women writers she was not. They published my letter, but then let the guy write a reply and scurry to the library and actually read Nightwood, one of my all-time, all-times, and Francis Bacon’s too, there’s another anecdote. And it’s burned in my brain his response, which was as dismissive and bourgeois as the review. I don’t remember the exact wordage, but he concluded by summing up that Djuna Barnes was a minor writer. Well, fuck a duck, as Henry Miller would say. And that is how the canon gets made.

The 1990s to the present: feminism, historicism, postcolonialism, ethics There has never been a better time to study Virginia Woolf. Woolf studies, in the 1990s and in the new millennium, has continued to flourish and diversify in all its numerous and proliferating aspects. In this recent period the topics that occupied earlier critics continue in new debates, on her modernism, her philosophy and ethics, her feminism and her aesthetics; and there have also been marked turns in new directions. Woolf and her work have been increasingly examined in the context of empire, drawing on the influential field of postcolonial studies; and, stimulated by the impetus of new historicism and cultural materialism, there have been new attempts to understand Woolf ’s writing and persona in the context of the public and private spheres, in the present as well as in her own time. Woolf in the context of war and fascism, and in the contexts of modernity, science and technology, continue to exercise critics. Serious, sustained readings of lesbianism in Woolf ’s writing and in her life have marked recent feminist interpretations in Woolf studies. Enormous advances have also been made in the study of Woolf ’s literary and cultural influences and allusions. Numerous annotated and scholarly editions of Woolf ’s works have been appearing since she briefly came out of copyright in 1991, accompanied by several more scholarly editions of her works in draft and holograph, encouraging further critical scrutiny of her compositional methods. There have been several important reference works on Woolf. Many biographies of Woolf and her circle have also appeared, renewing biographical criticism, along with a number of works concerned with Woolf in geographical context, from landscape and London sites to Woolf ’s and her circle’s many houses and holiday retreats.

In Fleury’s day, however, the grass was cut and the graves well cared for. Besides, as you might expect, he was fond of graveyards; he enjoyed brooding in them and letting his heart respond to the abbreviated biographies he found engraved in their stones . . . so eloquent, so succinct! All the same, once he had spent an hour or two pondering by his mother’s grave he decided to call it a day because, after all, one does not want to overdo the lurking in graveyards. This decision was not a very sudden one. From the age of sixteen when he had first become interested in books, much to the distress of his father, he had paid little heed to physical and sporting matters. He had been of a melancholy and listless cast of mind, the victim of the beauty and sadness of the universe. In the course of the last two or three years, however, he had noticed that his sombre and tubercular manner was no longer having quite the effect it had once had, particularly on young ladies. They no longer found his pallor so interesting, they tended to become impatient with his melancholy. The effect, or lack of it, that you have on the opposite sex is important because it tells you whether or not you are in touch with the spirit of the times, of which the opposite sex is invariably the custodian. The truth was that the tide of sensitivity to beauty, of gentleness and melancholy, had gradually ebbed leaving Fleury floundering on a sandbank. Young ladies these days were more interested in the qualities of Tennyson’s “great, broad-shouldered, genial Englishman” than they were in pallid poets, as Fleury was dimly beginning to perceive. Louise Dunstaple’s preference for romping with jolly officers which had dismayed him on the day of the picnic had by no means been the first rebuff of this kind. Even Miriam sometimes asked him aloud why he was looking “hangdog” when once she would have remained silent, thinking “soulful”. All

Among the theologians of the Confessing Church who early on took Bultmann’s side in the debate over demythologizing was Dietrich Bonhoeffer. In 1942 he declared the commentary on John and the Alpirsbach lecture to be among the most important recent theological publications,269 and expressed his pleasure that with his venture Bultmann had begun an intellectually honest discussion of a problem that many had suppressed. In Asmussen and Dilschneider’s “arrogance” and the “Pharisaism of belief” Bonhoeffer saw “a real disgrace for the Confessing Church.”270 To be sure, he could not endorse Bultmann’s position completely. “I would like to speak with Bultmann about this, and I would like to expose myself to the breeze that emanates from him. But then the window will have to be closed again. Otherwise, those who are delicate will too easily catch a chill.”271 Later, during his imprisonment in Tegel, Bonhoeffer came to think that Bultmann had not gone far enough, and that it was necessary to subject not only mythological but all religious concepts to a nonreligious interpretation.272

As Joss showed up to start work on the new season, Barr gathered everyone on staff and made a speech about how the tabloids were obsessed with her and had sources among the crew feeding them details of her personal life. Joss, who had heard about tabloid drama and the staff conflicts, anticipated a speech that would bring everybody closer: “It’s us against the world, and dammit, we’ve got good work to do here, let’s all get it done.” Instead, Roseanne told the writers they had better keep their mouths shut or they would all be fired. It was a plot twist that he wasn’t expecting. “It made me realize … that every time somebody opens their mouth they have an opportunity to do one of two things— connect or divide. Some people inherently divide, and some people inherently connect,” Joss said. “Connecting is the most important thing, and actually an easy thing to do. I try to make a connection with someone every time I talk to them, even if I’m firing them…. People can be treated with respect. That is one of the most important things a show runner can do, is make everybody understand that we’re all involved, that we’re all on the same level.

Hitler derived several things from his experience and achievements in World War I, without which his rise to power in 1933 would have been at the least problematical, and at the most inconceivable. Hitler survived the war as a combat soldier—a rifle carrier—in a frontline infantry regiment. The achievement was an extraordinary one based on some combination of near-miraculous luck and combat skill. The interpretive fussing over whether or not Hitler was a combat soldier because he spent most of the war in the part of the regiment described as regimental headquarters can be laid to rest as follows: Any soldier in an infantry regiment on an active front in the west in World War I must be considered to have been a combat soldier. Hitler’s authorized regimental weapon was the Mauser boltaction, magazine-fed rifle. This gives a basic idea of what Hitler could be called upon to do in his assignment at the front. As a regimental runner, he carried messages to the battalions and line companies of the regiment, and the more important ones had to be delivered under outrageously dangerous circumstances involving movement through artillery fire and, particularly later in the war, poison gas and the omnipresent rifle fire of the skilled British sniper detachments. --Hitler: Beyond Evil and Tyranny, p. 96

Jesus himself remains an enigma. There have been interesting attempts to uncover the figure of the ‘historical’ Jesus, a project that has become something of a scholarly industry. But the fact remains that the only Jesus we really know is the Jesus described in the New Testament, which was not interested in scientifically objective history. There are no other contemporary accounts of his mission and death. We cannot even be certain why he was crucified. The gospel accounts indicate that he was thought to be the king of the Jews. He was said to have predicted the imminent arrival of the kingdom of heaven, but also made it clear that it was not of this world. In the literature of the Late Second Temple period, there had been hints that a few people were expecting a righteous king of the House of David to establish an eternal kingdom, and this idea seems to have become more popular during the tense years leading up to the war. Josephus, Tacitus and Suetonius all note the importance of revolutionary religiosity, both before and after the rebellion.2 There was now keen expectation in some circles of a meshiah (in Greek, christos), an ‘anointed’ king of the House of David, who would redeem Israel. We do not know whether Jesus claimed to be this messiah – the gospels are ambiguous on this point.3 Other people rather than Jesus himself may have made this claim on his behalf.4 But after his death some of his followers had seen him in visions that convinced them that he had been raised from the tomb – an event that heralded the general resurrection of all the righteous when God would inaugurate his rule on earth.5 Jesus and his disciples came from Galilee in northern Palestine. After his death they moved to Jerusalem, probably to be on hand when the kingdom arrived, since all the prophecies declared that the temple would be the pivot of the new world order.6 The leaders of their movement were known as ‘the Twelve’: in the kingdom, they would rule the twelve tribes of the reconstituted Israel.7 The members of the Jesus movement worshipped together every day in the temple,8 but they also met for communal meals, in which they affirmed their faith in the kingdom’s imminent arrival.9 They continued to live as devout, orthodox Jews. Like the Essenes, they had no private property, shared their goods equally, and dedicated their lives to the last days.10 It seems that Jesus had recommended voluntary poverty and special care for the poor; that loyalty to the group was to be valued more than family ties; and that evil should be met with non-violence and love.11 Christians should pay their taxes, respect the Roman authorities, and must not even contemplate armed struggle.12 Jesus’s followers continued to revere the Torah,13 keep the Sabbath,14 and the observance of the dietary laws was a matter of extreme importance to them.15 Like the great Pharisee Hillel, Jesus’s older contemporary, they taught a version of the Golden Rule, which they believed to be the bedrock of the Jewish faith: ‘So always treat others as you would like them to treat you; that is the message of the Law and the Prophets.

In La Tête d’Obsidienne André Malraux relates a conversation that he had with Picasso in 1937, at the time he was painting “Guernica.” Picasso said, “People are always talking about the influence of the blacks on me. What can one say? We all of us liked those fetishes. Van Gogh said, ‘We all of us had Japanese art in common.’ In our day it was the Negroes. Their forms did not influence me any more than they influenced Matisse. Or Derain. But as far as Matisse and Derain were concerned, the Negro masks were just so many other carvings, the same as the rest of sculpture. When Matisse showed me his first Negro head he talked about Egyptian art. “When I went to the Trocadéro, it was revolting. Like a flea-market. The smell. I was all by myself. I wanted to get out. I didn’t go: I stayed. It came to me that this was very important: something was happening to me, right? “Those masks were not just pieces of sculpture like the rest. Not in the least. They were magic. And why weren’t the Egyptians or Chaldees? We hadn’t understood what it was really about: we had seen primitive sculpture, not magic. These Negroes were intercessors—that’s a word I’ve known in French ever since then. Against everything: against unknown, threatening spirits. I kept on staring at these fetishes. Then it came to me—I too was against everything. I too felt that everything was unknown, hostile! Everything! Not just this and that but everything, women, children, animals, smoking, playing … Everything! I understood what their sculpture meant to the blacks, what it was really for. Why carve like that and not in any other way?

Two days ago, I was lunching at the Writers Union with the eminent historian Tomashevski. That's the sort of man you should know. Respected, charming, hasn't produced a piece of work in ten years. He has a system, which he explained to me. First, he submits an outline for a biography to the Academy to be absolutely sure his approach is consistent with Party policy. A crucial first step, as you'll see later. Now, the person he studies is always an important figure - that is, someone from Moscow - hence Tomashevski must do his Russian research close to home for two years. But this historical character also traveled, yes, lived for some years in Paris or London; hence Tomashevski must do the same, apply for and receive permission for foreign residence. Four years have passed. The Academy and the Party are rubbing their hands in anticipation of this seminal study of the important figure by the eminent Tomashevski. And now Tomashevski must retire to the solitude of a dacha outside Moscow to tend his garden and creatively brood over his cartons of research. Two more years pass in seminal thought. And just as Tomashevski is about to commit himself to paper, he checks with the Academy again only to learn that Party policy has totally about-faced; his hero is a traitor, and with regrets all around, Tomashevski must sacrifice his years of labor for the greater good. Naturally, they are only too happy to urge Tomashevski to start a new project, to plow under his grief with fresh labor. Tomashevski is now studying a very important historical figure who lived for some time in the South of France. He says there is always a bright future for Soviet historians, and I believe him.

Hardy reinforces his narrative with stories of heroes who didn’t have the right education, the right connections, and who could have been counted out early as not having the DNA for success: “Richard Branson has dyslexia and had poor academic performance as a student. Steve Jobs was born to two college students who didn’t want to raise him and gave him up for adoption. Mark Cuban was born to an automobile upholsterer. He started as a bartender, then got a job in software sales from which he was fired.”8 The list goes on. Hardy reminds his readers that “Suze Orman’s dad was a chicken farmer. Retired General Colin Powell was a solid C student. Howard Schultz, the CEO of Starbucks, was born in a housing authority in the Bronx … Barbara Corcoran started as a waitress and admits to being fired from more jobs than most people hold in a lifetime. Pete Cashmore, the CEO of Mashable, was sickly as a child and finished high school two years late due to medical complications. He never went to college.” What do each of these inspiring leaders and storytellers have in common? They rewrote their own internal narratives and found great success. “The biographies of all heroes contain common elements. Becoming one is the most important,”9 writes Chris Matthews in Jack Kennedy, Elusive Hero. Matthews reminds his readers that young John F. Kennedy was a sickly child and bedridden for much of his youth. And what did he do while setting school records for being in the infirmary? He read voraciously. He read the stories of heroes in the pages of books by Sir Walter Scott and the tales of King Arthur. He read, and dreamed of playing the hero in the story of his life. When the time came to take the stage, Jack was ready.

There was a time when my life seemed so painful to me that reading about the lives of other women writers was one of the few things that could help. I was unhappy, and ashamed of it; I was baffled by my life. For several years in my early thirties, I would sit in my armchair reading books about these other lives. Sometimes when I came to the end, I would sit down and read the book through from the beginning again. I remember an incredible intensity about all this, and also a kind of furtiveness—as if I were afraid that someone might look through the window and find me out. Even now, I feel I should pretend that I was reading only these women's fiction or their poetry—their lives as they chose to present them, alchemized as art. But that would be a lie. It was the private messages I really liked—the journals and letters, and autobiographies and biographies whenever they seemed to be telling the truth. I felt very lonely then, self-absorbed, shut off. I needed all this murmured chorus, this continuum of true-life stories, to pull me through. They were like mothers and sisters to me, these literary women, many of them already dead; more than my own family, they seemed to stretch out a hand. I had come to New York when I was young, as so many come, in order to invent myself. And, like many modern people—modern women, especially—I had catapulted out of my context; in important ways, the life of my mother, in her English village, was not much help. I remember reading in those dark years a review by John Updike in which he smoothly compared the lives of Jean Rhys and Colette. The first was in the end a failure, the second a triumph, he said. I took it personally, felt a stab in the heart. And poor Jane Bowles, said someone else, in the Times—you'd have to admit that hers was a desperate life. The successes gave me hope, of course, yet it was the desperate bits I liked best. I was looking for directions, gathering clues...

The phone rang. It was a familiar voice. It was Alan Greenspan. Paul O'Neill had tried to stay in touch with people who had served under Gerald Ford, and he'd been reasonably conscientious about it. Alan Greenspan was the exception. In his case, the effort was constant and purposeful. When Greenspan was the chairman of Ford's Council of Economic Advisers, and O'Neill was number two at OMB, they had become a kind of team. Never social so much. They never talked about families or outside interests. It was all about ideas: Medicare financing or block grants - a concept that O'Neill basically invented to balance federal power and local autonomy - or what was really happening in the economy. It became clear that they thought well together. President Ford used to have them talk about various issues while he listened. After a while, each knew how the other's mind worked, the way married couples do. In the past fifteen years, they'd made a point of meeting every few months. It could be in New York, or Washington, or Pittsburgh. They talked about everything, just as always. Greenspan, O'Neill told a friend, "doesn't have many people who don't want something from him, who will talk straight to him. So that's what we do together - straight talk." O'Neill felt some straight talk coming in. "Paul, I'll be blunt. We really need you down here," Greenspan said. "There is a real chance to make lasting changes. We could be a team at the key moment, to do the things we've always talked about." The jocular tone was gone. This was a serious discussion. They digressed into some things they'd "always talked about," especially reforming Medicare and Social Security. For Paul and Alan, the possibility of such bold reinventions bordered on fantasy, but fantasy made real. "We have an extraordinary opportunity," Alan said. Paul noticed that he seemed oddly anxious. "Paul, your presence will be an enormous asset in the creation of sensible policy." Sensible policy. This was akin to prayer from Greenspan. O'Neill, not expecting such conviction from his old friend, said little. After a while, he just thanked Alan. He said he always respected his counsel. He said he was thinking hard about it, and he'd call as soon as he decided what to do. The receiver returned to its cradle. He thought about Greenspan. They were young men together in the capital. Alan stayed, became the most noteworthy Federal Reserve Bank chairman in modern history and, arguably the most powerful public official of the past two decades. O'Neill left, led a corporate army, made a fortune, and learned lessons - about how to think and act, about the importance of outcomes - that you can't ever learn in a government. But, he supposed, he'd missed some things. There were always trade-offs. Talking to Alan reminded him of that. Alan and his wife, Andrea Mitchell, White House correspondent for NBC news, lived a fine life. They weren't wealthy like Paul and Nancy. But Alan led a life of highest purpose, a life guided by inquiry. Paul O'Neill picked up the telephone receiver, punched the keypad. "It's me," he said, always his opening. He started going into the details of his trip to New York from Washington, but he's not much of a phone talker - Nancy knew that - and the small talk trailed off. "I think I'm going to have to do this." She was quiet. "You know what I think," she said. She knew him too well, maybe. How bullheaded he can be, once he decides what's right. How he had loved these last few years as a sovereign, his own man. How badly he was suited to politics, as it was being played. And then there was that other problem: she'd almost always been right about what was best for him. "Whatever, Paul. I'm behind you. If you don't do this, I guess you'll always regret it." But it was clearly about what he wanted, what he needed. Paul thanked her. Though somehow a thank-you didn't seem appropriate. And then he realized she was crying.

In life,” he said, “there are no essentially major or minor characters. To that extent, all fiction and biography, and most historiography, are a lie. Everyone is necessarily the hero of his own life story. Hamlet could be told from Polonius’s point of view and called The Tragedy of Polonius, Lord Chamberlain of Denmark. He didn’t think he was a minor character in anything, I daresay. Or suppose you’re an usher in a wedding. From the groom’s viewpoint he’s the major character; the others play supporting parts, even the bride. From your viewpoint, though, the wedding is a minor episode in the very interesting history of your life, and the bridge and groom both are minor figures. What you’ve done is choose to play the part of a minor character: it can be pleasant for you to pretend to be less important you know you are, as Odysseus does when he disguises as a swineherd. And every member of the congregation at the wedding sees himself as the major character, condescending to witness the spectacle. So in this sense fiction isn’t a lie at all, but a true representation of the distortion that everyone makes of life. “Now, not only are we the heroes of our own life stories–we’re the ones who conceive the story, and give other people the essences of minor characters. But since no man’s life story as a rule is ever one story with a coherent plot, we’re always reconceiving just the sort of hero we are, and consequently just the sort of minor roles that other people are supposed to play. This is generally true. If any man displays almost the same character day in and day out, all day long, it’s either because he has no imagination, like an actor who can play only one role, or because he has an imagination so comprehensive that he sees each particular situation of his life as an episode in some grand over-all plot, and can so distort the situations that the same type of hero can deal with them all. But this is most unusual. “This kind of role-assigning is myth-making, and when it’s done consciously or unconsciously for the purpose of aggrandizing or protecting your ego–and it’s probably done for this purpose all the time–it becomes Mythotherapy. Here’s the point: an immobility such as you experienced that time in Penn Station is possible only to a person who for some reason or other has ceased to participate in Mythotherapy. At that time on the bench you were neither a major nor a minor character: you were no character at all. It’s because this has happened once that it’s necessary for me to explain to you something that comes quite naturally to everyone else. It’s like teaching a paralytic how to walk again.

her that when he had first raised the idea, I hadn’t known he was sick. Almost nobody knew, she said. He had called me right before he was going to be operated on for cancer, and he was still keeping it a secret, she explained. I decided then to write this book. Jobs surprised me by readily acknowledging that he would have no control over it or even the right to see it in advance. “It’s your book,” he said. “I won’t even read it.” But later that fall he seemed to have second thoughts about cooperating and, though I didn’t know it, was hit by another round of cancer complications. He stopped returning my calls, and I put the project aside for a while. Then, unexpectedly, he phoned me late on the afternoon of New Year’s Eve 2009. He was at home in Palo Alto with only his sister, the writer Mona Simpson. His wife and their three children had taken a quick trip to go skiing, but he was not healthy enough to join them. He was in a reflective mood, and we talked for more than an hour. He began by recalling that he had wanted to build a frequency counter when he was twelve, and he was able to look up Bill Hewlett, the founder of HP, in the phone book and call him to get parts. Jobs said that the past twelve years of his life, since his return to Apple, had been his most productive in terms of creating new products. But his more important goal, he said, was to do what Hewlett and his friend David Packard had done, which was create a company that was so imbued with innovative creativity that it would outlive them. “I always thought of myself as a humanities person as a kid, but I liked electronics,” he said. “Then I read something that one of my heroes, Edwin Land of Polaroid, said about the importance of people who could stand at the intersection of humanities and sciences, and I decided that’s what I wanted to do.” It was as if he were suggesting themes for his biography (and in this instance, at least, the theme turned out to be valid). The creativity that can occur when a feel for both the humanities and the sciences combine in one strong personality was the topic that most interested me in my biographies of Franklin and Einstein, and I believe that it will be a key to creating innovative economies in the twenty-first century. I asked Jobs why he wanted me to be the one to write his biography. “I think you’re good at getting people to talk,” he replied. That was an unexpected answer. I knew that I would have to interview scores of people he had fired, abused, abandoned, or otherwise infuriated, and I feared he would not be comfortable with my getting them to talk. And indeed he did turn out to be skittish when word trickled back to him of people that I was interviewing. But after a couple of months,

A man should be so much greater than any material failure that can come to him that it would scarcely be mentioned in his biography, and that it would be regarded as a mere incident in his career,—inconvenient, but not very important

DON’T CONDUCT THE INTERVIEW IN THE RÉSUMÉ Here’s a good analogy. Your résumé is like a book report. You don’t tell the whole story in a book report; you simply provide a synopsis of the key highlights that STAND OUT as the most important information taken from the book. The same is true when writing a résumé. Your résumé must dangle the carrot, but not tell the whole story. Your résumé must communicate your value and enthusiastically engage the reader, not provide a long-winded, never-ending biography of your professional life. Your résumé must provide highlights of your professional experience that STAND OUT as the most important information that prospective employers would find valuable. Do not tell the whole story; don’t conduct the interview in the résumé.

chant: “We need a _____ floppy; We need a _____ floppy!” Jobs agreed only to include a floppy drive on a later model. Still, the Japanese company Canon was impressed enough to invest $100 million in 1989 for a 16.7 percent piece of the company, giving NeXT important cash while it tried to roll out its computers. By then, however, much had changed in the

The Government’s repeated response, however, even after October 1938, was to continue to attack his motives and judgement, and to seek to minimize the importance of his information. ‘No doubt it is not popular to say these things,’ Churchill had written to his wife on 26 September 1935, ‘but I am accustomed to abuse and I expect to have a great deal more of it before I have finished. Somebody has to state the truth.’ During

The Government’s repeated response, however, even after October 1938, was to continue to attack his motives and judgement, and to seek to minimize the importance of his information.

In politics it can be as important to punish your enemies as it is to reward your friends. It’s a limitation to be all carrot and no stick.

To salvage the genuine love he was deprived of in childhood, Rimbaud turned to the idea of love embodied in Christian charity and in understanding and compassion for others. He set out to give others what he himself had never received. He tried to understand his friend and to help Verlaine understand himself, but the repressed emotions from his childhood repeatedly interfered with this attempt. He sought redemption in Christian charity, but his implacably perspicacious intelligence would allow him no self-deception. Thus he spent his whole life searching for his own truth, but it remained hidden to him because he had learned at a very early age to hate himself for what his mother had done to him. He experienced himself as a monster, his homosexuality as a vice (this was easy to do given Victorian attitudes toward homosexuality), his despair as a sin. But not once did he allow himself to direct his endless, justified rage at the true culprit, the woman who had kept him locked up in her prison for as long as she could. All his life he attempted to free himself of that prison, with the help of drugs, travel, illusions, and above all poetry. But in all these desperate efforts to open the doors that would have led to liberation, one of them remained obstinately shut, the most important one: the door to the emotional reality of his childhood, to the feelings of the little child who was forced to grow up with a severely disturbed, malevolent woman, with no father to protect him from her. Rimbaud’s biography is a telling instance of how the body cannot but seek desperately for the early nourishment it has been denied. Rimbaud was driven to assuage a deficiency, a hunger that could never be stilled. His drug addiction, his compulsive travels, and his friendship with Verlaine can be interpreted not merely as attempts to flee from his mother, but also as a quest for the nourishment she had withheld from him. As his internal reality inevitably remained unconscious, Rimbaud’s life was marked by compulsive repetition.

For me, the most important thing is the overwhelming desire to write about a particular figure. That usually means I already have—even if I can’t articulate it yet—a vision of my subject. I have already decided I’m right for the biography. Everything else, then, will have to fall in line, no matter what obstacles I encounter. To prospective biographers I recommend that you know yourself first, that you know why you want to write about so-and-so. When you have convinced yourself—or as I like to say, deluded yourself—that you are the best person for the job, then it is time to take on all the other troubles you will surely face.

One of the innate dilemmas of biography is that life is not much like a book. It rarely contains a clearly stated thesis, coherently developed. Life sprawls, stumbles, advances, retreats, gropes for the light switch, and once in a while makes intuitive leaps whose import is barely understood until later, if ever, by the leaper. Life seems to me an improvisation.

PEOPLE are too full of themselves, says David Brooks, a columnist for the New York Times. Joe Namath, a star quarterback of the 1960s, once shouted to his bathroom mirror: “Joe! Joe! You’re the most beautiful thing in the world!”—with a reporter watching. But it is not just celebrities who puff themselves up, and the evidence is not just anecdotal. The proportion of American teenagers who believe themselves to be “very important” jumped from 12% in 1950 to 80% in 2005. On a test that asks subjects to agree or disagree with statements such as “I like to look at my body” and “Somebody should write a biography about me”, 93% of young Americans emerge as being more narcissistic than the average of 20 years ago.

Undoubtedly, Icahn is blessed with a superior mind, but it is his determination to play an activist role in his business deals, to keep finding solutions to a maze of problems, that separates him from the run-of-the-mill Wall Street opportunists who are quick to write off problem deals and move on to the next. Starting with his earliest campaigns, Icahn would build his reputation, and his all-important credibility, by refusing to retreat no matter how bleak the picture or how much the deck was stacked against him.

Chris’s eldest daughter Lily appears onstage and delivers a sage piece of wisdom her dad had imparted to her. “The most influential advice he gave me was that his success did not come from a desire for [success], it was more from a passion and an absolute love for what he did,” she said. “He reminded me often it was an added benefit, but that can never be the driving factor. My dad had a beautiful gift but the most important part of it was that he loved what he did, and he did it because he loved it.

Whitman was coming to think that he, above all, was the one chosen to agitate the country. He wrote in his 1856 notebook: “Agitation is the test of the goodness and solidness of all politics and laws and institutions.—If they cannot stand it, there is no genuine life in them, and shall die.” He once declared, “I think agitation is the most important factor of all—the most deeply important. To stir, to question, to suspect, to examine, to denounce!

When Chapman established his own ministry a few years later, he always stressed the importance of this type of meeting for all believers.

Still, the gospels are not biographies but apologetic documents, composed to persuade, to inspire, and to convince. (John is explicit about this: “These are written that you may believe…and that believing you may have life in his name.”) The gospels must be read critically, with a sense of historical context. Which is to say, the Last Words that we are about to encounter may or may not have actually been spoken by Jesus. What is certain is that each of the evangelists thought it important for his audience to believe that Jesus had said them.

They argued, after the ancient philosophers Plato and Plotinus, that the nature of the universe was spiritual rather than material, and that moral virtues and reason were God-given. The mortal life was meaningless, the appetites and senses a distraction; the important truths, and access to God, could only be attained through abstract thinking and intellectual reasoning.

The three most important assets in a footballer, he always said, were ‘skill, flair and character’.

Tho was Buffalo Bill Cody? Most people know, at the very least, that he was a hero of the Old West, like Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, and Kit Carson-one of those larger-than-life figures from which legends are made. Cody himself provided such a linkage to his heroic predecessors in 1888 when he published a book with biographies of Boone, Crockett, Carson-and one of his own autobiographies: Story of the Wild West and Campfire Chats, by Buffalo Bill (Hon. W.F. Cody), a Full and Complete History of the Renowned Pioneer Quartette, Boone, Crockett, Carson and Buffalo Bill. In this context, Cody was often called "the last of the great scouts." Some are also aware that he was an enormously popular showman, creator and star of Buffalo Bill's Wild West, a spectacular entertainment of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It has been estimated that more than a billion words were written by or about William Frederick Cody during his own lifetime, and biographies of him have appeared at irregular intervals ever since. A search of "Buffalo Bill Cody" on amazon.com reveals twenty-seven items. Most of these, however, are children's books, and it is likely that many of them play up the more melodramatic and questionable aspects of his life story; a notable exception is Ingri and Edgar Parin d'Aulaire's Buffalo Bill, which is solidly based on fact. Cody has also shown up in movies and television shows, though not in recent years, for whatever else he was, he was never cool or cynical. As his latest biographer, I believe his life has a valuable contribution to make in this new millennium-it provides a sense of who we once were and who we might be again. He was a commanding presence in our American history, a man who helped shape the way we look at that history. It was he, in fact, who created the Wild West, in all its adventure, violence, and romance. Buffalo Bill is important to me as the symbol of the growth of our nation, for his life spanned the settlement of the Great Plains, the Indian Wars, the Gold Rush, the Pony Express, the building of the transcontinental railroad, and the enduring romance of the American frontier-especially the Great Plains. Consider what he witnessed in his lifetime: the invention of the telephone, the transatlantic cable, the automobile, the airplane, and the introduction of modem warfare, with great armies massed against each other, with tanks, armored cars, flame-throwers, and poison gas-a far cry from the days when Cody and the troopers of the Fifth Cavalry rode hell-for-leather across the prairie in pursuit of hostile Indians. Nor, though it is not usually considered

Newton’s biography reveals that he was an extreme example of the Psychoticism trait. Psychoticism is important to genius because it describes someone who is uninterested and uninfluenced by the normal human concerns – which are essentially ‘other people.’ Most humans are social animals, who see life through social spectacles, and who are motivated by the desire for friends, sex, status, and so on. But not Newton. In his early and most creative years, he simply wanted to be allowed to get on with his work.

To help you with your own struggles, make a commitment to read a biography a month for a year. That will give you 12 stories, 12 people whose belief you can borrow. Commit to watching documentaries, as well. I try to watch one a week. It helps me discover new things and borrow belief when I need it. This practice has become one of the most important learning experiences in my life.

The Eclipse ofAchievement In a society in which the dream of success has been drained of any meaning beyond itself, men have nothing against which to measure their achievements except the achievements of others. Self-approval depends on public recognition and acclaim, and the quality of this approval has undergone important changes in its own right. The good opinion of friends and neighbors, which formerly informed a man that he had lived a useful life, rested on appreciation of his accomplishments. Today men seek the kind of approval that applauds not their actions but their personal attributes. They wish to be not so much esteemed as admired. They crave not fame but the glamour and excitement of celebrity. They want to be envied rather than respected. Pride and acquisitiveness, the sins of an ascendant capitalism, have given way to vanity. Most Americans would still define success as riches, fame, and power, but their actions show that they have little interest in the substance of these attainments. What a man does matters less than the fact that he has "made it." Whereas fame depends on the performance of notable deeds acclaimed in biography and works of history, celebrity-the reward of those who project a vivid or pleasing exterior or have otherwise attracted attention to themselves-is acclaimed in the news media, in gossip columns, on talk shows, in magazines devoted to "personalities." Accordingly it is evanescent, like news itself, which loses its interest when it loses its novelty. Worldly success has always carried with it a certain poignancy, an awareness that "you can't take it with you"; but in our time, when success is so largely a function of youth, glamour, and novelty, glory is more fleeting than ever, and those who win the attention of the public worry incessantly about losing it.

Don’t worry what people think now. Don’t ever work for popularity. Above all, don’t care what the newspapers say. What is important is that your decisions should be clear and stand up to history.” Princess Victoria of Hesse and by Rhine

and Alexander Starbuck were two of the earliest nonfiction writers to explore the profession of whaling. Macy wrote The History of Nantucket in 1835. It is, as the title suggests, a history of his island home and gives a concise overview of Nantucket's importance in the development of whaling. Starbuck's The History of the American Whale

Your success in life might depend on your intellectual abilities to an extent, but the most important factor that would decide your success or your failure is your desperation to succeed.

In an important sense, therefore, Benjamin’s biography describes the construction of a map not meant for the eye.

The heritage mattered, but the hope was all-important—hope for a new world, for the One God to become king at last.

In truth, Comte did not have much regard for literary culture. Chairs of literature and literary associations would be suppressed in the positivist era. He even seemed to discourage writing and reading anything after one's formal education was completed. A 'veritable positivist' - even a positivist priest - should reduce his library to one hundred volumes. Half of that library would be 'more historic than dogmatic' and thus would have 'little need to be reread.' People should read chiefly great poets pondering the human condition to enlarge their understanding. In the Catéchisme, he maintained that there were only thirteen great writers: Homer, Aeschylus, Dante, Ariosto, Tasso, Shakespeare, Caldéron, Corneille, Milton, Molière, Thomas à Kempis, Cervantes, and Walter Scott. There were perhaps another seven writers worth reading. Almost all the works of the others could be destroyed as harmful to the heart and mind, although he did allow for some of these works to be preserved as historical documents. At one point, Comte went so far as to announce that 'all of human knowledge' could be condensed into ten volumes. Moral activity now was most important to him

Much of the advertising focused on Graham’s name and image. He appreciated the power of repetition. He once remarked that the quality of the words and colors on a billboard was less important than the number of billboards a motorist passed.

One of the more interesting differences between the Gospels is the strategy used to begin their biographies of Jesus’s life and work. The Synoptics (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) begin in history, first recounting either the announcement of the birth of Jesus or the announcement of his prophetic forerunner John the Baptist. John, on the other hand, begins before history, in heaven, emphasizing the eternal relationship between God the Father and God the Son before the Son took on human nature. This is one of the reasons that the Synoptics are marked by greater similarity and overlap, whereas John often highlights other aspects of Jesus’s ministry as part of his overall strategy.

His biography is not relevant at all, because whenever a man becomes enlightened he has no biography. He is no more the form, so when he was born, when he died, are irrelevant facts. That’s why in the East we have never bothered about biographies, historical facts. That obsession has never existed here. That obsession has come from the West now; then people become interested more in irrelevant things. When a Sosan is born, what difference does it make – this year or that? When he dies, how is it important? Sosan is important, not his entry into this world and the body, not his departure. Arrivals and departures are irrelevant. The only relevance is in the being.

During the writing of this book, I found myself questioning why the sixteenth-century history of the Irish-English conflict—“the Mother of All the Irish Rebellions”—has been utterly ignored or forgotten. This episode was by far the largest of Elizabeth’s wars and the last significant effort of her reign. It was also the most costly in English lives lost, both common and noble. By some estimates, the rebellion resulted in half the population of Ireland dying through battle, famine, and disease, and the countryside—through the burning of forestland—was changed forever. Yet almost no one studies it, writes of it, or discusses it, even as the impact of that revolt continues to make headlines across the world more than four hundred years later. Likewise, few people outside Ireland have ever heard of Grace O’Malley, surely one of the most outrageous and extraordinary personalities of her century—at least as fascinating a character as her contemporary and sparring partner Elizabeth I. Of course history is written by the victors, and England was, by all accounts, the winner of the Irish Rebellion of the sixteenth century. But the mystery only deepens when we learn that the only contemporary knowledge we have of Grace’s exploits—other than through Irish tradition and legend—is recorded not in Ireland’s histories, but by numerous references and documentation in England’s Calendar of State Papers, as well as numerous official dispatches sent by English captains and governors such as Lords Sidney, Maltby, and Bingham. As hard as it is to believe, Grace O’Malley’s name never once appears in the most important Irish history of the day, The Annals of the Four Masters. Even in the two best modern books on the Irish Rebellion—Cyril Fall’s Elizabeth’s Irish Wars and Richard Berleth’s The Twilight Lords—there is virtually no mention made of her. Tibbot Burke receives only slightly better treatment. Why is this? Anne Chambers, author of my two “bibles” on the lives of Grace O’Malley (Granuaile: The Life and Times of Grace O’Malley) and Tibbot Burke (Chieftain to Knight)—the only existing biographies of mother and son—suggests that as for the early historians, they might have had so little regard for women in general that Grace’s exclusion would be expected. As for the modern historians, it is troubling that in their otherwise highly detailed books, the authors should ignore such a major player in the history of the period. It

You can’t observe historical events; you can’t question historical actors; you can’t even know most of what has not been written about. What has been written about therefore takes on an importance that may be spurious. A few lines in a memoir, a snatch of recorded conversation, a letter fortuitously preserved, an event noted in a diary: all become luminous with significance—even though they are merely the bits that have floated to the surface. The historian clings to them, while, somewhere below, the huge submerged wreck of the past sinks silently out of sight.

To belong somewhere. That was something much more important than belonging to someone. Now, he used to think to himself that maybe he took too serious that 'mission' of belonging somewhere.

Aristotle, means "the best purpose." In 384 BC he was born in Stagira, Greece on the Peninsula of Chalcidice in central Macedonia, located on the northern coast of the Aegean Sea. Aristotle was orphaned at a young age and moved to Athens as a teenager, where he continued his education at Plato’s Academy. After completing his education, Aristotle married Pythias, who bore him a daughter that they also named Pythias. In 343 BC, Philip II employed Aristotle to become the tutor to his son Alexander, who later became a great general. By 335 BC, Aristotle returned to Athens and established his own school, known as the Lyceum. Aristotle conducted courses at the school for the next twelve years. While in Athens, his wife Pythias died. Following her death Aristotle wrote most of his work, of which only remnants have survived. His most important treatises included Poetry, Politics, Physics, Metaphysics, Ethics and the meaning of a soul. Aristotle spent his life studying and teaching almost every subject possible at the time and added a great deal, to most of them. His resulting works became the encyclopedia of Greek knowledge. Near the end of his life, Alexander and Aristotle unfortunately became enemies resulting from Alexander's relationship with the Persians. The details of Aristotle’s life are sketchy at best, and the biographies that Aristotle wrote remain speculative. Although Aristotle contributed to the knowledge of the day, historians can only totally agree on very few things.

Those who give up cannot gain victory.” It’s not victory that is so important, but the fighting spirit. Even if you fail, I think even just the attitude of not giving up is beautiful in itself.

Zoos, he argued, would eventually be the last sanctuary for wild things as man increased in numbers and slowly encroached on the natural habitat. It was inevitable that when the interests of man conflicted with those of wildlife, the animals would go to the wall. His most cherished ambition in life was to create a special zoo where he could keep and breed some of these creatures in the hope that they would not be completely exterminated, and the one thing he felt passionately about was that all zoos must cease to be mere showplaces and become true scientific institutions where the welfare of the animals was of paramount importance.

I don't know who first said it, but this proverb is something I believe: A lion leading a lot of sheep can defeat a sheep leading many lions. The important part is that I must decide when I am a lion and when I must be a sheep. I don't believe you are always one or the other.