Essays & Short Works
- Philosophical Travelogues
- Essays on Society and Culture
- Essays for Personal Growth
- Explorations in Science and Thought
- Explorations in Psychology
- Political Essays and Reflections
- Political Essays and Manifestos
- Philosophical Essays on Existence
Sadhana, the Realisation of Life
Rabindranath Tagore was a Bengali poet, philosopher, visual artist, playwright, composer, and novelist whose work reshaped Bengali literatur…
The Negro Problem
This is a collection of essays, edited by Booker T. Washington, representative of what historians have characterized as "racial uplift …
The Letters of a Post-Impressionist
“Being the Familiar Correspondence of Vincent Van Gogh ... [Van Gogh's] art was appreciated during his life only by a very few and it is but…
Areopagitica
A prose tract or polemic by John Milton, published November 23, 1644, at the height of the English Civil War... Milton, though a supporter o…
Capital and Interest
Frédéric Bastiat was an early 19th century French economist/statesman whose common sense essays tried to battle the rise of so…
The Theory of the Leisure Class
Originally published by the Norwegian-American economist Thorstein Veblen while he was a professor at the University of Chicago in 1898, the…
A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis
These twenty-eight lectures to laymen are elementary and almost conversational. Freud sets forth with a frankness almost startling the diffi…
Radioactive Substances
Marie Curie, born in Warsaw in 1867, was a Polish-French physicist and chemist famous for her work on radioactivity. She was a pioneer in th…
Flowers from the Garden of Saint Francis
This is a collection of 365 moral admonitions of Saint Francis of Assisi (1182-1226) and other notable Franciscans. The compiler of this ant…
The World I Live In
The World I Live In by Helen Keller is a collection of essays that poignantly tells of her impressions of the world, through her sense of to…
All Things Are Possible
A passionate exponent of Russian Existentialism, Lev Shestov is little known in the English-speaking world but had an extensive influence on…
The Essays of Francis Bacon
Voltaire was an atheist. Diderot was Enlightened. But trite titles seldom encompass completely the beliefs of any individual. And this one f…
Tolstoy on Shakespeare
In this thought-provoking essay, Leo Tolstoy presents a critical examination of William Shakespeare's works, exploring the playwright's them…
The Mirror of the Sea
The Mirror of the Sea is a collection of autobiographical essays by Joseph Conrad, reflecting on his deep connection to the sea and the life…
Woman in the Nineteenth Century
Margaret Fuller was an American feminist, writer, and intellectual associated with the Transcendentalist movement. Her book Woman in the Nin…
The Subjection of Women
The Subjection of Women is the title of an essay written by John Stuart Mill in 1869, possibly jointly with his wife Harriet Taylor Mill, st…
Creative Unity
Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore talks of the many things he feels is necessary for creativity through joy of unity, he covers many topics like t…
Noted Speeches of Abraham Lincoln
A few of Lincoln's most famous speeches and the Lincoln-Douglas debate make for historic reading. (summary by David O)
The Perfect Wagnerite
The Perfect Wagnerite: A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring (originally published London, 1898) is a philosophical commentary on Richard Wagne…
Revolution
A collection of 13 essays written between 1900 and 1908, published in 1910. The lead essay, "Revolution", outlines how and why Lon…