Writings and musings of Thoreau after his return to Concord, Mass.

Montaigne's „The Essays" is an unusual book, largely due to the author's attitude to it. This is an exclusively everyday book, suitable for everyday use, in which the author does not discuss how the world works and where everything goes, but discusses the essential: how to raise children, how to build a married life, how to spend leisure time, etc. At the same time, Montaigne does not have a very high opinion of himself, although he praises him...

Originally published in 1907, this little volume presents M. Maeterlinck in a new character, not as a dramatist, but as a philosopher and an aesthetician. It is some sort of an 'apology' for his theatre. He visualises and synthesises his ideas of life and seems most anxious to share these thoughts with the reader. Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive....

"Philosophy explores the deepest, most fundamental questions of reality and this accessible and entertaining chronology presents 250 milestones of the most important theories, events, and seminal publications in the field over the last 3,500 years. The brief, engaging entries cover a range of topics and cultures, from the Hindu Vedas and Plato's theory of forms to Ockham's razor, Pascal's wager, Hume's A Treatise of Human Nature, existentialism, feminism,...

Anthony Grafton is the Henry Putnam University Professor of History at Princeton University. Desiderius Erasmus (1466–1536) was a Dutch humanist, scholar, and social critic, and one of the most important figures of the Renaissance. The Praise of Folly is perhaps his best-known work. Originally written to amuse his friend Sir Thomas More, this satiric celebration of pleasure, youth, and intoxication irreverently pokes fun at the pieties of theologians...

One of the most famous non-fiction American books, Walden by Henry David Thoreau is the history of Thoreau's visit to Ralph Waldo Emerson's woodland retreat near Walden Pond. Thoreau, stirred by the philosophy of the transcendentalists, used the sojourn as an experiment in self reliance and minimalism… "so as to "live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not,

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First published in 1689, "An Essay Concerning Human Understanding" is British philosopher John Locke's important and influential exposition on the foundation of human knowledge and understanding. Arranged into four books, the first book begins by rejecting the notion of innate ideas proposed by Descartes and proposes instead that humans are born as blank slates. Book two argues that all knowledge is derived from experience and reflection. Locke also...

Thoreau's autobiographical account of his experiment in solitary living, his refusal to play by the rules of hard work and the accumulation of wealth and, above all, the freedom it gave him to adapt his living to the natural world around him.

An account of a two-week boat and hiking trip from Concord, Massachusetts, to the White Mountains of New Hampshire.

Past and Present is a book by Thomas Carlyle.[1] It was published in April 1843 in England and the following month in the United States. It combines medieval history with criticism of 19th-century British society. Carlyle wrote it in seven weeks as a respite from the harassing labor of writing Cromwell. He was, inspired by the recently published Chronicles of the Abbey of Saint Edmund's Bury, which had been written by Jocelin of Brakelond at the close...