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1. Flannery O’Connor (1925-1964)
At the age of twenty-six, Flannery O’Connor was diagnosed with disseminated lupus, and given five years to live. She was staying with friends in Connecticut when she fell ill. Flannery had left the...
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2. Thomas Paine (1737-1809)
In the course of his life, Thomas Paine invented a smokeless candle, received a patent for a single-span iron bridge, worked on developing steam engines, made corsets by day and wrote political...
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3. Mohandas Gandhi (1869-1948)
Very few people on this list of well-lived lives spent as much time thinking about how to live a ‘well-lived life’ as Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. He examined every aspect of life—large and small—from...
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4. Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910)
Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy wrote two of the best novels of all time. War and Peace was published in 1869. The novel details the events leading up to the French invasion of Russia, as seen through the...
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5. Harriet Tubman (1822-1913)
In 1849, Harriet Tubman trekked ninety miles from Maryland to Philadelphia under constant threat of being caught and either killed or returned to the white family that owned her. When she arrived in...
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6. Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519)
The word “genius” is doubtlessly overused. Leonardo da Vinci, however, was the real deal. He showed what the human brain—albeit just one—is capable of. He was a painter, sculptor, architect, engineer,...
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7. Alimamy Rassin (1825-1890)
Alimamy Rassin was a Fula chief from Sierra Leone, who devoted his life to making peace. Raised in a warrior culture during the 1800s, he was a pacifist from an early age; he harbored an innate hatred...
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8. Socrates (469–399 BC)
Socrates was, by his own account, “a gadfly”. He spent his days in the ancient Athenian marketplace asking awkward questions, disconcerting the people he met by showing them how little they genuinely...
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