Michel de Montaigne was one of the most influential figures of the Renaissance, singlehandedly responsible for popularising the essay as a literary form. In 1572, Montaigne retired to his estates in order to devote himself to leisure, reading and reflection. There he wrote his constantly expanding 'essays', inspired by the ideas he found in books from his library and his own experience. He discusses subjects as diverse as war-horses and cannibals, poetry and politics, sex and religion, love and friendship, ecstasy and experience. Above all, Montaigne studied himself to find his own inner...
Resistance to Civil Government, also called On the Duty of Civil Disobedience or Civil Disobedience for short, is an essay by American transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau that was first published in 1849. In it, Thoreau argues that individuals should not permit governments to overrule or atrophy their consciences, and that they have a duty to avoid allowing such acquiescence to enable the government to make them the agents of injustice. Thoreau was motivated in part by his disgust with slavery and the Mexican–American War (1846–1848)....
In more than a century since its appearance, José Rizal's Noli Me Tangere has become widely known as the great novel of the Philippines. A passionate love story set against the ugly political backdrop of repression, torture, and murder, "The Noli," as it is called in the Philippines, was the first major artistic manifestation of Asian resistance to European colonialism, and Rizal became a guiding conscience—and martyr—for the revolution that would subsequently rise up in the Spanish province....
"When I was alive and had a human heart," answered the statue, "I did not know what tears were, for I lived in the Palace of Sans–Souci, where sorrow is not allowed to enter. In the daytime I played with my companions in the garden, and in the evening I led the dance in the Great Hall. Round the garden ran a very lofty wall, but I never cared to ask what lay beyond it, everything about me was so beautiful. My courtiers called me the Happy Prince, and happy indeed I was, if pleasure be happiness. So I lived, and so I died. And now that I am dead they have set me up here so high that I can see...
An after-dinner conversation, the focal point of this short story, manages to monopolize the reader's attention from the very beginning. An American artist is longing to create his masterpiece. In his pursuit, he has found a way to expel his frustration through a discussion about the magnum opuses of different artists. This is the turning point of his life....
Guide-books are so many that it seems probable we have more than any other country—possibly more than all the rest of the universe together. Every county has a little library of its own—guides to its towns, churches, abbeys, castles, rivers, mountains; finally, to the county as a whole. They are of all prices and all sizes, from the diminutive paper-covered booklet, worth a penny, to the stout cloth-bound octavo volume which costs eight or ten or twelve shillings, or to the gigantic folio county history, the huge repository from which the guide-book maker gets his materials. For these great...
El Filibusterismo, the second of Jose Rizal's novels of Philippine life, is a story of the last days of the Spanish regime in the Philippines. Under the name of The Reign of Greed it is for the first time translated into English. Written some four or five years after Noli Me Tangere, the book represents Rizal's more mature judgment on political and social conditions in the islands, and in its graver and less hopeful tone reflects the disappointments and discouragements which he had encountered in his efforts to lead the way to reform. Rizal's dedication to the first edition is of special...
"Walter Pater was a Bohemian author and philosopher. His philosophy emphasizes the function of art in the creation of culture and is often referred to as aestheticism. He is a English poet of the nineteenth century, was a critic of sorts. He wrote in the style of a literary reader, taking the reader through a long poem or essay to show how he felt about any particular topic. In his essay on style, Pater does just that. ‘Style is the passion with which the soul strives after a purpose, a mark of distinction, a characteristic of itself.”...
THE consulting–rooms of Dr Orion Hood, the eminent criminologist and specialist in certain moral disorders, lay along the sea–front at Scarborough, in a series of very large and well–lighted french windows, which showed the North Sea like one endless outer wall of blue–green marble. In such a place the sea had something of the monotony of a blue–green dado: for the chambers themselves were ruled throughout by a terrible tidiness not unlike the terrible tidiness of the sea. It must not be supposed that Dr Hood's apartments excluded luxury, or even poetry....
