Book picks similar to
Notes for a Romantic Encyclopaedia: Das Allgemeine Brouillon by Novalis
philosophy
romanticism
german
x-encxylophonedia-x
The Captain is Out to Lunch and the Sailors Have Taken Over the Ship
Charles Bukowski - 1998
Bukowski's last journals candidly and humorously reveal the events in the writer's life as death draws inexorably nearer, thereby illuminating our own lives and natures, and to give new meaning to what was once only familiar. Crumb has illustrated the text with 12 full-page drawings and a portrait of Bukowski.
The Prophet
Kahlil Gibran - 1923
Published in 1923, it has been translated into more than twenty languages, and the American editions alone have sold more than nine million copies.The Prophet is a collection of poetic essays that are philosophical, spiritual, and, above all, inspirational. Gibran’s musings are divided into twenty-eight chapters covering such sprawling topics as love, marriage, children, giving, eating and drinking, work, joy and sorrow, housing, clothes, buying and selling, crime and punishment, laws, freedom, reason and passion, pain, self-knowledge, teaching, friendship, talking, time, good and evil, prayer, pleasure, beauty, religion, and death.
Novels, Tales, Journeys: The Complete Prose of Alexander Pushkin
Alexander Pushkin - 1837
The father of Russian literature, Pushkin is beloved not only for his poetry but also for his brilliant stories, which range from dramatic tales of love, obsession, and betrayal to dark fables and sparkling comic masterpieces, from satirical epistolary tales and romantic adventures in the manner of Sir Walter Scott to imaginative historical fiction and the haunting dreamworld of "The Queen of Spades." The five short stories of The Late Tales of Ivan Petrovich Belkin are lightly humorous and yet reveal astonishing human depths, and his short novel, The Captain's Daughter, has been called the most perfect book in Russian literature.From the Hardcover edition.
Hyperion A Fragment
John Keats - 1820
Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.
Works of W. Somerset Maugham
W. Somerset Maugham - 1977
It is indexed alphabetically, chronologically and by category, making it easier to access individual books, stories and poems. This collection offers lower price, the convenience of a one-time download, and it reduces the clutter in your digital library. All books included in this collection feature a hyperlinked table of contents and footnotes. The collection is complimented by an author biography.
Table of Contents
The ExplorerThe HeroThe Land of PromiseThe Land of the Blessed VirginLiza of LambethThe MagicianMoon and SixpenceOf Human BondageThe Trembling of a LeafAppendix:W. Somerset Maugham BiographyAbout and Navigation
The Soul of Man Under Socialism
Oscar Wilde - 1891
Wilde argues that under capitalism the majority of people spoil their lives by an unhealthy and exaggerated altruism-are forced, indeed, so to spoil them: instead of realizing their true talents, they waste their time solving the social problems caused by capitalism, without taking their common cause away. Thus, caring people seriously and very sentimentally set themselves to the task of remedying the evils that they see in poverty, but their remedies do not cure the disease: they merely prolong it because, the proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible.
The End of Suffering: Finding Purpose in Pain
Scott Cairns - 2009
And I have an increasingly keen sense that, wherever I am, someone nearby is suffering now.For that reason, I lately have settled in to mull the matter over, gathering my troubled wits to undertake a difficult essay, more like what we used to call an assay, really—an earnest inquiry. I am thinking of it just now as a study in suffering, by which I hope to find some sense in affliction, hoping—just as I have come to hope about experience in general—to make something of it.” Is there meaning in our afflictions?With the thoughtfulness of a pilgrim and the prose of a poet, Scott Cairns takes us on a soul-baring journey through “the puzzlement of our afflictions.” Probing ancient Christian wisdom for revelation in his own pain, Cairns challenges us toward a radical revision of the full meaning and breadth of human suffering. Clear-eyed and unsparingly honest, this new addition to the literature of suffering is reminiscent of The Year of Magical Thinking as well as the works of C. S. Lewis. Cairns points us toward hope in the seasons of our afflictions, because “in those trials in our lives that we do not choose but press through—a stillness, a calm, and a hope become available to us.”
Utopia
Thomas More
The book is a frame narrative primarily depicting a fictional island society as described by the character Raphael Hythloday who lived there some years, who describes and its religious, social and political customs.
The Prince
Niccolò Machiavelli
Hence: Can Machiavelli, who makes the following observations, be Machiavellian as we understand the disparaging term? 1. So it is that to know the nature of a people, one need be a Prince; to know the nature of a Prince, one need to be of the people. 2. If a Prince is not given to vices that make him hated, it is unsusal for his subjects to show their affection for him. 3. Opportunity made Moses, Cyrus, Romulus, Theseus, and others; their virtue domi-nated the opportunity, making their homelands noble and happy. Armed prophets win; the disarmed lose. 4. Without faith and religion, man achieves power but not glory. 5. Prominent citizens want to command and oppress; the populace only wants to be free of oppression. 6. A Prince needs a friendly populace; otherwise in diversity there is no hope. 7. A Prince, who rules as a man of valor, avoids disasters, 8. Nations based on mercenary forces will never be solid or secure. 9. Mercenaries are dangerous because of their cowardice 10. There are two ways to fight: one with laws, the other with force. The first is rightly man’s way; the second, the way of beasts.
Bulfinch's Mythology
Thomas Bulfinch - 1855
The stories are divided into three sections: The Age of Fable or Stories of Gods and Heroes (first published in 1855); The Age of Chivalry (1858), which contains King Arthur and His Knights, The Mabinogeon, and The Knights of English History; and Legends of Charlemagne or Romance of the Middle Ages (1863). For the Greek myths, Bulfinch drew on Ovid and Virgil, and for the sagas of the north, from Mallet's Northern Antiquities. He provides lively versions of the myths of Zeus and Hera, Venus and Adonis, Daphne and Apollo, and their cohorts on Mount Olympus; the love story of Pygmalion and Galatea; the legends of the Trojan War and the epic wanderings of Ulysses and Aeneas; the joys of Valhalla and the furies of Thor; and the tales of Beowulf and Robin Hood. The tales are eminently readable. As Bulfinch wrote, "Without a knowledge of mythology much of the elegant literature of our own language cannot be understood and appreciated. . . . Our book is an attempt to solve this problem, by telling the stories of mythology in such a manner as to make them a source of amusement."Thomas Bulfinch, in his day job, was a clerk in the Merchant's Bank of Boston, an undemanding position that afforded him ample leisure time in which to pursue his other interests. In addition to serving as secretary of the Boston Society of Natural History, he thoroughly researched the myths and legends and copiously cross-referenced them with literature and art. As such, the myths are an indispensable guide to the cultural values of the nineteenth century; however, it is the vigor of the stories themselves that returns generation after generation to Bulfinch.
Soul and Form
György Lukács - 1910
"Soul and Form" was his first book, published in 1910, and it established his reputation, treating questions of linguistic expressivity and literary style in the works of Plato, Kierkegaard, Novalis, Sterne, and others. By isolating the formal techniques these thinkers developed, LukAcs laid the groundwork for his later work in Marxist aesthetics, a field that introduced the historical and political implications of text.For this centennial edition, John T. Sanders and Katie Terezakis add a dialogue entitled "On Poverty of Spirit," which LukAcs wrote at the time of "Soul and Form," and an introduction by Judith Butler, which compares LukAcs's key claims to his later work and subsequent movements in literary theory and criticism. In an afterword, Terezakis continues to trace the LukAcsian system within his writing and other fields. These essays explore problems of alienation and isolation and the curative quality of aesthetic form, which communicates both individuality and a shared human condition. They investigate the elements that give rise to form, the history that form implies, and the historicity that form embodies. Taken together, they showcase the breakdown, in modern times, of an objective aesthetics, and the rise of a new art born from lived experience.
The Rings of Saturn
W.G. Sebald - 1995
A few of the things which cross the path and mind of its narrator (who both is and is not Sebald) are lonely eccentrics, Sir Thomas Browne's skull, a matchstick model of the Temple of Jerusalem, recession-hit seaside towns, wooded hills, Joseph Conrad, Rembrandt's "Anatomy Lesson," the natural history of the herring, the massive bombings of WWII, the dowager empress Tzu Hsi, and the silk industry in Norwich.
The Big Five for Life
John P. Strelecky - 2007
It will change your life in ways you can't know now, but you'll understand completely once you're done reading it.It will also forever enhance the way you look at your role as a leader. That includes the way you lead at home, at work, in your community...and especially the way you lead you.At every given moment we are all called to be leaders. If for no other purpose than to lead ourselves.After all, someone has to inspire you to get out of bed each day. And that someone, is you.It is told from the perspective of Thomas Derale, a man viewed by the people around him as the greatest leader in the world. At fifty-five years of age he learns he is dying. Yet even in that the act of dying he inspires everyone around him to live.The principles in this book, such as the Big Five for Life and Museum Day Morning, have positively impacted readers around the world. Each in their own unique way as they have applied them to their life, their situation.
The Spinoza Problem
Irvin D. Yalom - 2012
Rosenberg is stunned to discover that Goethe, his idol, was a great admirer of the Jewish seventeenth-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza. Long after graduation, Rosenberg remains haunted by this “Spinoza problem”: how could the German genius Goethe have been inspired by a member of a race Rosenberg considers so inferior to his own, a race he was determined to destroy?Spinoza himself was no stranger to punishment during his lifetime. Because of his unorthodox religious views, he was excommunicated from the Amsterdam Jewish community in 1656, at the age of twenty-four, and banished from the only world he had ever known. Though his life was short and he lived without means in great isolation, he nonetheless produced works that changed the course of history. Over the years, Rosenberg rose through the ranks to become an outspoken Nazi ideologue, a faithful servant of Hitler, and the main author of racial policy for the Third Reich. Still, his Spinoza obsession lingered. By imagining the unexpected intersection of Spinoza’s life with Rosenberg’s, internationally bestselling novelist Irvin D. Yalom explores the mindsets of two men separated by 300 years. Using his skills as a psychiatrist, he explores the inner lives of Spinoza, the saintly secular philosopher, and of Rosenberg, the godless mass murderer.
Jonathan Livingston Seagull
Richard Bach - 1970
He believes it is every gull's right to fly, to reach the ultimate freedom of challenge and discovery, finding his greatest reward in teaching younger gulls the joy of flight and the power of dreams. The special 20th anniversary release of this spiritual classic!