Book catalog
Find the right book by idea, author, or theme.
A focused catalog for source-grounded book pages. Filter the shelf without crowding the front page.
A Tale of Two Cities
Across London and Paris in the years before and during the French Revolution, a family bound together by love is caught in the rising violence, and a wasted man redeems his life by laying it down for another.
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
Mary Wollstonecraft argues that women are rational beings whose degraded condition is a product of bad education, not nature, and that granting them equal education and civil standing would benefit society as a whole.
Acres of Diamonds
Russell H. Conwell argues through parable and example that wealth and opportunity are almost always present in a person's own community, not somewhere distant, and that pursuing them honestly is a moral duty.
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
A boy fakes his own death and rafts down the Mississippi with Jim, a man fleeing slavery, until his own conscience forces him to choose between the rules he was raised on and the friend at his side.
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
Locke argues that the mind holds no innate ideas and that all knowledge is built from experience through sensation and reflection.
Anna Karenina
Two intertwined lives, Anna's ruinous passion for Vronsky and Levin's slow search for a way to live, trace how a society of appearances pulls one soul toward death and the other toward faith.
As a Man Thinketh
James Allen argues that a person's repeated thoughts shape character, conduct, and the way life is met.
Beyond Good and Evil
Nietzsche attacks the hidden prejudices of philosophers and the morality of good and evil, calling for free spirits who create their own values.
Beyond the Pleasure Principle
Freud argues that beneath the mind's drive for pleasure lie older, darker compulsions: a tendency to repeat painful experiences and, at the deepest level, a drive toward the dissolution of life itself.
Bushido: The Soul of Japan
Nitobe explains to the West the unwritten moral code of the Japanese samurai, tracing how chivalry shaped a nation's character.
Civil Disobedience (On the Duty of Civil Disobedience / Resistance to Civil Government)
Thoreau argues that the individual conscience outranks the authority of the majority, and that a person of principle must refuse, not merely protest, unjust laws.
Commentaries on the Gallic War
Caesar's own dispatch-like record of his eight-year conquest of Gaul, narrated in the third person, in which a Roman general reports campaign after campaign, observes the peoples he fights, and brings the war to its climax at the siege of Alesia.
Common Sense
Thomas Paine strips monarchy and hereditary rule of their pretensions and argues, in plain language, that ordinary people can and should govern themselves.
Confessions
Augustine tells the story of his sins, searching, and conversion as one long prayer, arguing that the restless human heart finds peace only in God.
Crime and Punishment
A destitute student murders a pawnbroker to prove he is one of the extraordinary men permitted to transgress the law, then is slowly broken and remade by guilt, suffering, and love.
Democracy in America
A French observer examines young America to show how equality of conditions shapes democratic society, and to warn of the quiet tyrannies democracy can breed alongside its freedoms.
Discourse on the Method
Descartes sets aside every uncertain belief and rebuilds knowledge from a single certainty discovered by his own reason.
Discourses
Epictetus teaches that freedom comes from distinguishing what is in our power from what is not, and from the disciplined right use of our impressions.
Don Quixote
An ageing gentleman, his wits undone by reading too many books of chivalry, renames himself Don Quixote and rides out to revive knight-errantry, colliding with a world that sees only an old man tilting at windmills.
Essays
Montaigne examines himself with candor to learn how a changeable, uncertain human being can think honestly and live well.
Ethics
Spinoza argues that understanding God or Nature frees the mind from the bondage of the passions.
Experiments in Plant Hybridization
Eight years of carefully counted pea-plant crosses reveal that inherited traits are governed by discrete units that sort and recombine according to fixed mathematical ratios, founding the science of genetics.
Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds
A chronicle of how whole nations have abandoned reason together, in financial bubbles, religious frenzies, and social crazes, and recovered only one by one.
Faust
A weary scholar who has exhausted all learning strikes a bargain with the devil for boundless experience, and his restless striving carries an innocent young woman to ruin.
Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions
A two-dimensional Square's encounter with a Sphere from Spaceland forces him to imagine higher dimensions, then lands him in prison for preaching what he saw.
Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus
A young scientist who animates a creature from dead matter abandons it in horror, and the rejected being's grief turns to vengeance that destroys them both.
Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals
Kant seeks the supreme principle of morality and locates it in a will that acts from duty under a law it could will for everyone.
Hamlet (The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark)
A Danish prince ordered to avenge his murdered father discovers that thought itself can become the obstacle to action, and that revenge, when finally achieved, destroys everything in reach.
Heart of Darkness
On a yawl moored in the Thames, the seaman Marlow recounts a journey up an African river to retrieve the ivory agent Kurtz, and finds in the company's brutal trade and in Kurtz's collapse a darkness that belongs to civilization itself.
How to Live on 24 Hours a Day
Arnold Bennett argues that every person already possesses a budget of twenty-four hours a day, and that the task of life is to spend it with intention rather than let it dissolve unexamined.
Les Misérables
A convict freed after nineteen years for stealing bread is shown undeserved mercy by a bishop, and Hugo follows his lifelong struggle to become an honest man while law, poverty, and revolution close in around him.
Letters to His Son
Across decades of private letters, an 18th-century statesman coaches his son in the arts of attention, manner, and worldly knowledge needed to become a gentleman who can rise at court and in society.
Leviathan
Hobbes argues that without a common power to keep all in awe life collapses into a war of every man against every man, and that the cure is a sovereign created by the consent of all.
Meditations
Marcus Aurelius trains himself to meet life through reason, duty, self-command, and acceptance of nature.
Moby-Dick; or, The Whale
A wandering sailor signs onto a whaling ship whose captain has bent the whole voyage to a single obsession, killing the white whale that maimed him, and tells how that hunt destroys them all.
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave
Frederick Douglass tells the story of his own life in bondage and the path by which he learned to read, refused to be broken, and escaped to freedom.
Nicomachean Ethics
Aristotle argues that the human good is happiness, reached by exercising virtue, and that virtue is a settled habit aiming at the mean between excess and defect.
On Liberty
John Stuart Mill argues that the only legitimate reason to restrict any person's freedom is to prevent harm to others, and that society, not just government, can tyrannise.
On the Origin of Species
Darwin demonstrates that the immense diversity of life on Earth arises not from separate acts of creation but from descent with modification, driven by the relentless pressure of natural selection.
On the Shortness of Life
Seneca argues that life is not short but squandered, and that only the person who learns how to live possesses time.
Paradise Lost
Milton's epic follows Satan's fall from Heaven and Adam and Eve's temptation and expulsion from Paradise, staging the cosmic drama of free will, pride, and the origin of human suffering.
Pensées
Pascal's unfinished defence of Christianity reads the human condition as a knot of greatness and misery, and argues that reason alone cannot reach the God the heart longs for.
Plutarch's Lives (Parallel Lives)
Plutarch pairs the lives of famous Greeks and Romans and reads their characters out of their deeds, words, and small revealing moments, asking what kind of person each statesman or general really was.
Politics
Aristotle treats the city as a natural community whose purpose is not mere survival but the good life of its citizens.
Pride and Prejudice
Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy each mistake the other through pride and prejudice, and only by revising their first judgments do they earn an honest love.
Psychology of the Unconscious
Jung traces a shared layer of myth and symbol beneath individual minds, redefining libido as the whole energic life of the psyche and showing how ancient imagery lives on in every person's unconscious.
Pushing to the Front
Marden argues that ordinary people rise to the front not by accident or favor but by decisiveness, concentrated effort, and an unshakeable belief in their own power to succeed.
Reflections on the Revolution in France
Burke argues against the French Revolution's destruction of inherited institutions, insisting that durable liberty must be built on tradition, prescription, and the partnership of the living, the dead, and the unborn.
Relativity: The Special and General Theory
Einstein explains, in plain language, why space and time are not fixed backgrounds but quantities that shift with the observer, and why matter curves the geometry of the universe itself.
Rights of Man
Thomas Paine argues that natural rights belong to every person by birth, precede all government, and cannot be surrendered by any parliament, king, or dead generation on behalf of the living.
Self-Help; with Illustrations of Conduct and Perseverance
Samuel Smiles argues that perseverance and character, not birth or circumstance, are what make the achiever, and that the health of nations is simply the sum of individual effort and integrity.
Self-Reliance
Emerson argues that a person must trust the inner voice of conviction rather than live by conformity.
Studies in Pessimism
A set of essays arguing that suffering, not happiness, is the basic fact of existence, and that a clear-eyed pessimism is the honest response to a world driven by a restless will to live.
Tao Te Ching
The Tao Te Ching teaches that life and good rule follow the unnameable Tao through stillness, yielding, and acting without forcing.
The Analects
A collection of Confucius's sayings and conversations that teaches how steady self-cultivation, ritual propriety, and humane conduct order both the person and the state.
The Art of War
Sun Tzu presents strategy as the disciplined use of knowledge, timing, deception, and position to win with minimum waste.
The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
Franklin traces his rise from poverty to public life by treating virtue as a practical skill: named, sequenced, and tracked daily in a small book of his own making.
The Bhagavad Gita
On the edge of battle a despairing warrior is taught to act from duty without clinging to results, to master his own mind, and to give himself in devotion to the divine.
The Bible (King James Version)
A library of law, history, poetry, prophecy, and gospel that traces, in the Authorized Version's English, the relationship between God and humanity from creation to a promised renewal.
The Book of Tea
The Book of Tea presents Teaism as a quiet cult of the Imperfect, in which the ceremony of tea distils Taoist and Zen ideals into an everyday art of living beautifully.
The Brothers Karamazov
Through the lives of one disordered Russian family and the murder of its father, Dostoyevsky stages a contest between doubt and faith, freedom and security, asking whether a moral life is possible without God.
The Chemical History of a Candle
Six lectures in which Faraday uses the chemistry of a burning candle to teach the whole of natural philosophy, from capillary action and combustion to the composition of air and the analogy between fire and human respiration.
The Communist Manifesto (Manifesto of the Communist Party)
Marx and Engels argue that all recorded history is the history of class struggle, and that the industrial proletariat will inevitably overthrow the bourgeoisie and establish a classless society.
The Consolation of Philosophy
Awaiting execution, Boethius is taught by Philosophy that fortune's gifts are unstable and that the only true good is the unchanging happiness found in God.
The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind
When individuals form a crowd, their conscious personality dissolves and they become a single primitive being governed by contagion, suggestion, and the spell of whoever can command prestige.
The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex
Darwin extends his theory of evolution to humanity, arguing that our bodily structure, mental faculties, moral sense, and racial differences all arose through natural and sexual selection from lower animal forms.
The Dhammapada
The Dhammapada gathers the Buddha's teaching into verses showing that all we are springs from our thoughts, and that mastering the mind and the self is the only path to peace.
The Divine Comedy
A soul lost in the dark wood of sin is led by reason and then by grace through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise, ascending from despair toward the love that orders all things.
The Education of Henry Adams
Writing about himself in the third person, Henry Adams treats his own life as a failed experiment in education, asking how any nineteenth-century mind could be trained to meet the accelerating, fragmenting forces of the twentieth.
The Elements (Euclid's Elements of Geometry)
Starting from a handful of definitions, postulates, and axioms, Euclid builds the whole of plane geometry proposition by proposition, making each conclusion inescapable before the next begins.
The Enchiridion
Epictetus teaches that freedom begins by caring only for what is truly within your power.
The Federalist Papers
Hamilton, Madison, and Jay argue that a republic large enough and structured enough, with separated powers, a multiplicity of factions, and an energetic executive, can check tyranny without collapsing into paralysis.
The Histories
Herodotus inquires into why Greeks and Persians came to war, weaving the rise of empires, the customs of distant peoples, and the great Persian invasions of Greece into one vast account meant to keep great deeds from being forgotten.
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
Gibbon opens his vast history at the empire's height under the Antonines, then begins to trace, with cool irony and close attention to causes, the long revolution by which Rome declined and fell.
The History of the Peloponnesian War
An Athenian general turned historian records the long war between Athens and Sparta, stripping away legend to study how power, fear, and self-interest drive states toward triumph and catastrophe.
The Iliad
In the tenth year of the Trojan War, the rage of Achilles over a wounded pride sets in motion the death of his friend, the killing of Hector, and a hard reckoning with mortality and grief.
The Imitation of Christ
A medieval manual of devotion that calls the reader away from worldly vanity toward humility, the inner life, and the steady imitation of Christ.
The Interpretation of Dreams
Freud argues that every dream is the disguised fulfilment of an unconscious wish, and that the processes which produce this disguise (condensation, displacement, and censorship) are the same mechanisms that shape neurosis, revealing the hidden structure of the unconscious mind.
The Metamorphosis
A travelling salesman wakes transformed into a giant insect, and the story follows how his family's pity curdles into rejection until his quiet death sets them free.
The Odyssey
After the fall of Troy, the cunning Ulysses fights his way home across a sea full of monsters and gods to reclaim his wife, son, and kingdom from the suitors who have overrun his house.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
A beautiful young man wishes that his portrait would age in his place; his wish is granted, and as he pursues pleasure without consequence the canvas records the corruption his face is spared.
The Power of Concentration
Trained, focused attention is the lever behind every achievement, and concentration is a discipline that any person can develop through deliberate practice of the will.
The Prince
Machiavelli sets aside how rulers ought to behave and examines how power is actually acquired, held, and lost, treating politics as a science of real conditions rather than of moral ideals.
The Principia (The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy)
Newton lays down three laws of motion and a law of universal gravitation, then uses them to derive the motions of the planets, the tides, and the comets from a single mathematical framework.
The Principles of Psychology
James's founding map of the mind charts habit, the stream of consciousness, attention, the self, emotion, and will, establishing psychology as a rigorous science without losing sight of lived experience.
The Prophet
On the eve of his departure, a beloved prophet answers his townspeople's questions about love, work, freedom, and death, turning everyday life into the dwelling place of the sacred.
The Qur'an
The central scripture of Islam, revealed over two decades to the Prophet Muhammad, proclaiming the absolute unity of God, the duties of worship and justice, and the certainty of accountability beyond death.
The Republic
Plato's dialogue asks what justice is, and answers by building an ideal city and the well-ordered soul that mirrors it.
The Science of Getting Rich
Wattles argues that wealth follows inevitably from thinking and acting in a specific creative way aligned with the infinite formative power underlying all things.
The Social Contract
Rousseau argues that legitimate political authority rests not on force or birth but on a social compact through which each person gives themselves equally to all, and the resulting general will becomes the only rightful sovereign.
The Souls of Black Folk
Du Bois examines the inner life of Black Americans in the post-Reconstruction United States through the twin lenses of the Veil and double-consciousness: the forced experience of seeing oneself perpetually through the eyes of a hostile world.
The Subjection of Women
Mill argues that the legal subordination of women to men is wrong in principle, harmful in practice, and a cost the whole of society pays.
The Upanishads
The Upanishads teach that the innermost Self and the absolute reality behind the universe are one, and that knowing this directly is the true aim of life.
The Varieties of Religious Experience
William James examines religion not through theology or church doctrine but through the lived psychological experiences of individuals, mapping how faith operates in the human soul.
The Wealth of Nations
Adam Smith argues that the annual labour of a nation is the true source of its wealth, and that individuals pursuing their own interest under competitive markets unintentionally advance the prosperity of society as a whole.
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
A prophet descends from the mountains to teach the Superman, the death of God, and the courage to create new values in a world without inherited meaning.
Up from Slavery: An Autobiography
Booker T. Washington traces his rise from slavery to the founding of Tuskegee, arguing that practical skill, useful labour, and patient self-help could earn the Negro race respect and a secure place in the South.
Utilitarianism
Mill defends the Greatest Happiness Principle, the view that the right action is the one producing the most well-being, and argues that higher pleasures of the mind outweigh lower pleasures of the body, and that justice is ultimately grounded in utility.
Walden
Thoreau retreats to the woods to live deliberately, stripping life to its essentials to learn what living truly requires.
War and Peace
Across the years of Russia's wars with Napoleon, Tolstoy follows a handful of families through love, battle, and ruin while arguing that history is moved not by great men but by the countless small acts of ordinary people.
No books found
Try a broader title, author, idea, or theme.