Lives

What Hacker News says

1. billfruitNov 2019
   I would rather take Plutarch than either of them, the very tricks and manipulations described in his Lives are still what politicians still use day to day to get what they want done.
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2. godelmachineApr 2019
   The Conquest of Happiness by Bertrand Russell.

   Never knew unhappiness after I read this. Highly recommended.

   Another one is Méditations by Marcus Aurelius.

   Lives by Plutarch if you have the patience.

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3. gaddersMay 2018
   Charisma - How to get that special magic by Marcia Grad. I'd probably think it was corny as anything now but it helped a lacking in confidence teenager become somewhat less so.

   How to Win Friends and Influence People - made me realise that 99.99% of anything you want to to do, you have to do by working through other people, and the best way to do that 99.99% of the time is to befriend and get on with people as far as possible.

   The Power of One by Bryce Courtenay - Just a great story about a young, bullied kid in South Africa who learns to box.

   Lives of the Greeks and Romans by Plutarch - shows you that human nature hasn't changed much in 2,000 years.

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4. zogrodeaJul 2024
   Great article. Reminds me of this quote from RG Collingwood about how pervasive copying has been throughout history, and how the famous names we know to have copied would be baffled about us being shocked.

   "Individualism would have it that the work of a genuine artist is altogether ‘original’, that is to say, purely his own work and not in any way that of other artists. The emotions expressed must be simply and solely his own, and so must his way of expressing them.

   It is a shock to persons labouring under this prejudice when they find that Shakespeare’s plays, and notably Hamlet, that happy hunting-ground of self-expressionists, are merely adaptations of plays by other writers, scraps of Holinshed, Lives by Plutarch, or excerpts from the Gesta Romanorum; that Handel copied out into his own works whole movements by Arne; that the Scherzo of Beethoven’s C minor Symphony begins by reproducing the Finale of Mozart’s G minor, differently barred; or that Turner was in the habit of lifting his composition from the works of Claude Lorrain. Shakespeare or Handel or Beethoven or Turner would have thought it odd that anybody should be shocked."

   I do understand the desire to protect one's work too and find it hard to take a single side.

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5. CapriciousCptlJun 2021
   Hmm, I dug further. The story probably comes from Plutarch (Lives), "[Crassus] would buy houses that were afire, and houses which adjoined those that were afire, and these their owners would let go at a trifling price owing to their fear and uncertainty"[1].

   Plutarch was closer to Crassus than I am so I guess I can't argue.

   [1] https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/e/roman/texts/plutarch/...

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6. bfrsMay 2012
   I have browsed through the The Harvard Classics [1], but totally missed Cicero. I read XII. Lives, by Plutarch, but IX. On Friendship, On Old Age & Letters, by Cicero, must have seemed like a bunch of platitudes at that time. Now I know better and will read it.

   [1] http://www.bartleby.com/hc/

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