Who are your personal heroes, /his/?
1/3
As a child I loved Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, and I still do. I love both of them not only because of their works, but also because of their personalities. I admire Leonardo’s curiosity and his will to know everything and to master every topic (although it’s an impossible task*). As for Michelangelo, I love his extreme capacity for work, his endurance, his capacity of using his enormous egocentrism as fuel to his art (and not simply as a bitter fungus that would eat him up while he sat silently in the dark, as it happens to so many people).
As I grew up Shakespeare also became one of my heroes. He is one of the few people in history who was able to produce quality poetry. Most poems and poets (even a great number of famous ones) seem dull, especially in contrast to Shakespeare. I love his indulgence in rhetoric, his great love for language and his exuberance in using metaphors. No other poet is so fanatic for metaphors and colorful poetic imagery as Shakespeare is. I also like the way Shakespeare seemed to accept all human beings, taking interest in all sorts of people.
I don’t know much about music, but I always loved Beethoven. His works are sublime, and, although I like Bach, Mozart and Brahms, Beethoven remains my favorite. I also admire his strong personality and, like Michelangelo, his capacity for hard work. I love to see his many manuscripts and drafts, the hundreds of corrections he made while working: he modeled and remodeled his ideas several times, discarding many original concepts before he came to his final form. I deeply admire this man who, in spite of suffering a lot to really achieve what he wanted, simply kept moving forward, refusing to give up or to produce anything simpler than his colossal ideals.
>>416233
2/3
I also love Tolstoy. I think he is the greatest novelist and short-story writer of all time, but he is also an inspiration for me for the same reason as Michelangelo and Beethoven: an enormous capacity for work, and the magical chemistry of taming an unprecedented egocentrism and use it for the making of sublime art. Tolstoy was extremely proud, always paying attention on others, as if to compete with them, always trying to be the best at everything that he did, and constantly writing is his diaries the life-long struggles that he faced while trying to dissolve every single one of his defects and transform it in a virtue. Later in life his philosophical and religious views became so distorted by his huge appetite for fame and influence that he became boring at a lot of times, but the early and middle-aged Tolstoy has always been an inspiration for me: he was a powerhouse of a man, and a great example of how to face difficulties.
As for fiction, I love the Myamoto Musashi created by Takehico Inoue in his manga, Vagabond. I like to see a man who feels, like everyone feels, several stings and bites of weakness (fear, anxiety, laziness, lust, pride), but who manages to keep walking toward his goals in spite of this attacks. This work shows that the difference between strong people and weak people is not in the fact that the strong don’t feel fear, or laziness, etc., but that, although they feel this things, just like the weak person, they refuse to give in.
>>416240
3/3
*I must refuse some of the ideas that the general public have about Leonardo, stating that he was a botanist, and inventor, a mathematician, an anatomist, and other things. The fact that he made drawings of trees and flowers does not make him a botanist: he never catalogued species, or reasoned about their reproductive method, or imagined how their organisms work: he merely drew them – that’s not what a botanist is. As for anatomy, it is true that his drawings of the human body are sublime, some of the best ever made. However one must aknowledge that he worked with specialized people who helped him dissect the bodies, and that he had no insight about how the human body worked (nothing that was original for his own time, except some observation on one of the hearts valves). As for his inventions, many of them were simply fantastical drawings, works of the imagination that would never work on real life: they were reproduced in large scale, but they did not work. As for mathematics, he was actually pretty bad with arithmetic’s and did not have facility or a gift with this field. He was, however, more at home with geometry, although he did not contribute to any field of mathematic: he was a student of it, and not a very gifted one.
All of this, however, does not take away the merit of Leonardo’s deep curiosity, his enormous vigor for study and observation, his sublime art, his talent for drawing (he is one of the best, if not the best, draftsman in history) and some of his insights, like, for example, the tought that, since there were shell-fossils on the top of mountains, that soil should have been, sometime in the long forgotten past, under the waters.
As for Audrey Hepburn, she is (in my opinion) the most beautiful woman of all time.
>>416233
Jesus and Hitler
>/b/
>/cringethread/
>>416330
Why the cringe?
>>416233
Laius, because he introduced anal sex to Greece, and from there, to the world.
Julius Caesar for the story about the pirates and for his outlook on death.
David Hume for being a total pimp-ass bastard throughout his life.
Nietzsche for being so self-aware.
Heisenberg for being such a great scientist.
Euler for being the best mathematician ever to have lived.
>>416363
source?
>>416233
>No other poet is so fanatic for metaphors and colorful poetic imagery as Shakespeare is
>>416388
>treating myths and folklore as history in his travel novel
Herodotus may be the father of history, but Thucydides is history's responsible uncle who rescued history from history's shitty unstable home life.
Makhno was the realest in the game, he fought for freedom and made Lenin and Denikin super butthurt
>>416399
Dante is not very found of metaphors, m8: he uses them very modeslty. When he uses imagery he favors the simile (which is like salt when confronted to the metaphors, that is more like pepper), and even with simile he uses in a much more restricted way than Shakespeare. Dante is more narrative; although he uses verse and rhyme his language is quite sober.
Jules Henri Poincare, for laying the foundation for the study of complex systems
>>416233
Napoleon Bonaparte
desu
>>416429
My post was more about the 'colorful' poetic imagery part, but yes, I think he uses a bit more similes than metaphors.
Based Mannerheim
>commanded troops in Russo-Japanese war, World War 1, Finnish Civil War and through out World War 2
>highly respected almost everywhere
>great politician
He is called the greatest Finn of all time and I agree.
>>416233 (OP)
>>416240
>>416249
>>416372
>Hatori Hanzo for being one of the few players in the Sengoku Jidai who wasn't a backstabbing rat-bastard.
Most honorable (or who could at least be considered honorable) warriors are mine ie. Uesegi Kenshin, Takeda Shingen, Sho Hashi, Godfrey of Bouillon, Richard the Lion Heart, Saladin, Germanicus
>>416648
he's still a finn though t b h
Almost the entirety of the Komnenos dynasty. They all were pretty brilliant rulers, really clever guys.
I've always wondered how so many rulers from the Komenos dynasty were so competent.
>>416764
Good list. Ever heard of Pierre Terrail?
>>416367
http://imgur.com/gallery/WUKgr
>>416423
> he fought for freedom
> freedom
What does that mean in this context?
>>416233
Major General James Longstreet, Commanding Officer, First Corp of the Army of Northern Virginia, Confederate States of America.
>>417174
not having to put up with stupid ass shit
Bismarck since early high school. We need a new bismarck to unite the disparate human tribes and get us into space desu
John D. Rockefeller
>>416233
John Wayne and Lil Wayne
Not even joking
Rommel when I was a kid
maybe Alexander now? I don't really view historical figures in a personal heroic sense but more of a general one
Alexander was a true tough ass who got into the battle with his men as well as strategized effectively
Andrew Carnegie
Dwight Eisenhower
Theodore Roosevelt
Bartolomé de las Casas
Richard Holbrooke
General Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck
>>416233
I have none. I tend to see history as a series of movements and trends and see individuals as mere products of them.
>>419062
poor taste, in both cases
>>419448
>Unironically being a Marxist
My personal hero is Charlemagne.
I used to have a hard-on for Byron during my 19 year old romanticist phase, but, let's be honest, the guy was kind of a tool.
George Washington
John Adams
Thomas Jefferson
Quite a mixed bag:
Brian Boru
James Connolly
Richard the Lionheart
Saladin
Henry V
Manfred von Richthofen
Lauri Törni
Erwin Rommel
Erich von Manstein
Georgy Zhukov
