Something good to read
Complete short texts — an essay, a fable, a letter, a poem — each one whole, each one readable in a single sitting, each with its source named. Nothing is an extract that stops mid-argument. When you finish one, a button brings the next.
31 texts · about 85 minutes of reading · all of it free and out of copyright.
Start reading →A Reflection
Watching the rush of the world go past from just outside it.
Kate Chopin · 1 min · Calm
A soldier's one-word religion
An old soldier's answer — to live as long as he could — against every vague modern philosophy.
G. K. Chesterton · 5 min · A delight
Born in a one-room slave cabin
Washington describes the earthen floor, the potato hole, and not knowing his own birthday.
Booker T. Washington · 4 min · Calm
An evening spent in the blues
Jerome narrates a bachelor's entire evening of moping, and why married men get off lighter.
Jerome K. Jerome · 4 min · A delight
El Dorado, and why arriving is not the point
Stevenson argues that wanting beats having, and that no journey is really about its end.
Robert Louis Stevenson · 4 min · Calm
Everyone gets the same twenty-four hours
Bennett insists nobody is ever given more time than anyone else, and calls that the real miracle.
Arnold Bennett · 5 min · Practical
Gitanjali, the first three songs
On being emptied and filled again, on singing, and on struggling to find the voice.
Rabindranath Tagore · 2 min · Calm
Franklin's thirteen virtues
His working list — temperance to humility — each with the one-line rule he held himself to.
Benjamin Franklin · 2 min · Practical
How cats explain a field of clover
Darwin traces cats to mice to bees to flowers, then asks what really shapes a landscape.
Charles Darwin · 3 min · A delight
I alone am different
On dropping borrowed wisdom, and on being the odd one out who has kept something real.
Laozi · 2 min · Calm
If—
Kipling sets out, line by line, what it takes to keep your head when others lose theirs.
Rudyard Kipling · 1 min · Energising
Of studies
Bacon on why we read, how to read different books differently, and what study cannot fix.
Francis Bacon · 3 min · Practical
On Love
Almitra asks the prophet to speak of love, and he answers with its cost as well as its gift.
Kahlil Gibran · 2 min · Calm
Riding out a windstorm in a treetop
Muir climbs a swaying spruce in a gale, on purpose, to feel how the forest moves.
John Muir · 2 min · Energising
Six short poems on luck, loss and kindness
The six that open the book, ending on her most quoted line about a small life well spent.
Emily Dickinson · 2 min · Calm
Roosevelt against the life of ease
He argues that a nation, like a person, is ruined by choosing comfort over effort.
Theodore Roosevelt · 3 min · Energising
Socrates argues that death is no evil
Condemned to die, he reasons aloud that death is either a dreamless sleep or a journey.
Plato · 2 min · Calm
The clearing, seen two ways
James meets a mountain farmer and realises his own eye had missed the meaning of a life.
William James · 3 min · Challenging
The Old Horse
A boy is given the family's ageing horse to ride, and gets a lesson he never forgets.
Leo Tolstoy · 3 min · Calm
The Gettysburg Address, in full
Lincoln, in under 300 words, redefines what the war and the dead were for.
Abraham Lincoln · 1 min · Challenging
The sovereignty of the sick bed
Lamb crowns the sick man a tyrant on his throne, then watches recovery shrink him to size.
Charles Lamb · 4 min · A delight
The harm principle
Mill's one-paragraph rule for the only time society may ever overrule what you do.
John Stuart Mill · 1 min · Challenging
The spider's invisible bridge
Fabre measures a spider's walk through mid-air and finds a thread the wind had woven.
Jean-Henri Fabre · 2 min · A delight
The two things a friend must be
Emerson names them: someone you can be entirely honest with, and entirely gentle with.
Ralph Waldo Emerson · 5 min · Calm
The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse
A country mouse visits his city cousin and finds out what luxury actually costs.
Aesop · 1 min · A delight
Trading bread for reading lessons
Forbidden to learn letters, Douglass bribes white boys with bread for reading lessons.
Frederick Douglass · 3 min · Challenging
What Chesterton found in his own pockets
Stuck on a rainy train with nothing to read, he searches his pockets and finds a universe.
G. K. Chesterton · 4 min · A delight
What is in your power
The opening rule: sort what you control from what you do not, and spend yourself only on the first.
Epictetus · 2 min · Practical
What you really are
Marcus Aurelius reminds himself he is flesh, breath and a ruling mind — and that time is short.
Marcus Aurelius · 2 min · Calm
Why Thoreau walked four hours a day
A dry case for the daily walk, and some pity for the neighbours chained to their shops.
Henry David Thoreau · 2 min · A delight
Why Thoreau went to the woods
The famous case for living deliberately, and for cutting life down to what matters.
Henry David Thoreau · 3 min · Calm