Kindle Notes & Highlights
He ate like Dr. Johnson, and drank only less than Boswell.
“The custom in Germany is to rise only for people one respects.”
What I am is all the result of the direst need.”
Haydn was too happy to be profoundly great, and spoke too often to say much.
That letter must have crossed one from Leopold, whose emotion may remind us again that the events of history were written upon human flesh:
Mozart’s trained memory was allied with this capacity to perceive aggregates, to feel the logic that compelled the part to indicate the whole.
Wisdom has no nationality.
The climate forbade haste, and sanctioned indolence.
Music served both love and war; in either case it aroused attack and soothed defeat.
One cannot hold one’s heart in one’s hand, forcing it or releasing it, tightening or relaxing one’s grasp at will.
Gazing at her, he “forgot that there was a Siberia.”
“Your Majesty must first give me another army to force mine to advance.”72
“I am serving the Empire in educating competent youths.”
“when she enters an unlit room,” he said, “she lights it up.”
We hear the woman behind the ruler—the heart behind history—
We get a measure of the high repute won by the French philosophes when we see the two ablest rulers of the eighteenth century proud to correspond with them, and competing for their praise.
bagatelle
With all your high principles one would make fine books, but very bad business. … You work only upon paper, which endures all things; … but I, poor Empress as I am, work on the human skin, which is irritable and ticklish to a different degree.”
Study mankind, learn to use men without surrendering to them unreservedly. Search for true merit, be it at the other end of the world, for usually it is modest and retiring.
“I have people enough to make happy,” she said, “and that little corner of the earth will add nothing to my comfort.”
Chesmé (July, 1770);
Potemkin, exhausted, relapsed into luxurious indolence and shameless incest with his nieces; and on October 15, 1791, he died on a road near Jassy. Catherine fainted three times on the day that she heard of his death.
Catherine had not reached Constantinople, but she had risen to the zenith of her career as the most powerful ruler in Europe, and the most remarkable woman of her century.
Frederick the Great thought that if Catherine were corresponding with God she would claim at least equal rank.
“She forgave easily, and hated no one. Tolerant, understanding, of a gay disposition, she had a republican spirit and a kind heart.”
Ridendo castigat mores —“He chastizes manners with laughter”;
The success of the latter was so complete that Potemkin advised the author to “die now, or never write again”—
Without knowing it, she made fine bargains, for these gleanings included eleven hundred pieces by Raphael, Poussin, Vandyck, Rembrandt, and other perennials, whose value has grown with the advance of time and the retreat of currency. Through Grimm and Diderot (whose Salons she followed carefully) she gave commissions to French artists—Vernet, Chardin, Houdon. She had life-size copies made of Raphael’s frescoes in the Vatican, and built a special gallery for them in the Hermitage.
“You know,” she wrote in 1779, “that the mania for building is stronger with us than ever, and no earthquake ever demolished as many structures as we have set up. …
The generosity of Catherine, the splendor of her reign, the magnificence of her court, her institutions, her monuments, her wars, were precisely to Russia what the age of Louis XIV was to Europe; but, considered individually, Catherine was greater than this Prince. The French formed the glory of Louis; Catherine formed that of the Russians. She had not, like him, the advantage of reigning over a polished people; nor was she surrounded from infancy by great and accomplished characters.
her faults were an infection from her time, but her virtues were her own.
But limitation is the essence of liberty, for as soon as liberty is complete it dies in anarchy.
Polish morals resembled the German at table and the French in bed.
the nation protested, still it learned.
Poniatowski received the congratulations of the philosophers and the scorn of his people.
It was, of course, the triumph of organized power over reactionary impotence.
seek a quiet corner, and let happiness come by stealth.
The attempt to reconcile opposites may lead to madness as well as to philosophy.
The influence of the constitution adopted by the United States of America (1787-88) was evident in these recommendations;
He was suspected of homosexuality,6 but of this we have only surmise.
He liked to have a philosopher or two at his table to flay the parsons and stir the generals.
He was the first avowedly agnostic ruler of modern times, but he made no public attack upon religion.
His favorite philosophers were “my friend Lucretius, … my good Emperor Marcus Aurelius”; nothing of any importance, he thought, had been added to them.
“The Enlightenment,” said Frederick, “is a light from heaven for those who stand on the heights, and a destructive firebrand for the masses”;
“Let us admit the truth: philosophy and the arts are diffused amongst only a few; the great masses … remain as nature made them, malevolent animals.”
The human mind is weak; more than three fourths of mankind are made for subjection to the most absurd fanaticism.
Every man has a wild beast in him; few can restrain it; most men let loose the bridle when not restrained by terror of the law.
A democracy, to survive, must be, like other governments, a minority persuading a majority to let itself be led by a minority.
these royale—
Though I came too late, I do not regret it, for I have seen Voltaire , … and he writes to me.
