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.
65 texts · about 3 hours of reading · all of it free and out of copyright.
37 of them take two minutes or less. By mood: 21 a delight · 24 calm · 6 practical · 9 challenging · 5 energising. Every text is whole, never an extract, and names the edition it came from.
Read today’s text →What do you feel like?
A pyramid of canvas at night
A young sailor lies out on the tip of the bowsprit on a still tropical night and sees his own ship as a stranger would, sails reaching up to the stars.
Richard Henry Dana · 2 min · Calm
A ship from a field in Fairhaven
A sailor with no ship is handed a rotting old sloop propped up in a field, fells an oak for the keel and rebuilds her himself, with whaling captains dropping by to advise.
Joshua Slocum · 4 min · Energising
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
At fifteen I bent my mind on learning
Confucius on governing by example, the seven ages of his own mind, and what respect for a parent really means.
Confucius · 2 min · Calm
An evening spent in the blues
Jerome narrates a bachelor's entire evening of moping, in forensic and merciless detail.
Jerome K. Jerome · 3 min · A delight
Born a slave, with no record of when
He does not know his birthday, his ancestry, or his father — and says so without self-pity.
Booker T. Washington · 2 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
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
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
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
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
How do I love thee
The last three sonnets, ending on the one everybody half-remembers and nobody reads whole.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning · 2 min · Calm
How roast pig was discovered
Lamb's tall tale: a boy burns the house down and invents crackling by accident.
Charles Lamb · 4 min · A delight
If—
Kipling sets out, line by line, what it takes to keep your head when others lose theirs.
Rudyard Kipling · 1 min · Energising
Jabberwocky
The nonsense poem everyone half-remembers, whole, and then Alice admitting she has no idea what it means.
Lewis Carroll · 1 min · A delight
Life is long enough, if you know how to use it
He goes down the list of how men spend themselves — on money, on wine, on other people's opinions — and finds the time was never the thing in short supply.
Seneca · 3 min · Challenging
Mujina
Tokyo, a dark slope, a weeping woman who will not show her face. Hearn's most famous ghost story, whole.
Lafcadio Hearn · 3 min · A delight
My mother at the river
A Dakota girl of seven, running free beside the Missouri, learns why her mother cries.
Zitkála-Šá · 4 min · Challenging
My financial career
Leacock walks into a bank to open an account with fifty-six dollars, and loses his nerve completely.
Stephen Leacock · 4 min · A delight
Of studies
Bacon on why we read, how to read different books differently, and what study cannot fix.
Francis Bacon · 3 min · Practical
Noise murders thought
Schopenhauer, furious at the cracking of whips, explains why interruption ruins a mind.
Arthur Schopenhauer · 3 min · A delight
On getting out of bed
A Roman emperor argues with himself about staying under the blankets, and loses.
Marcus Aurelius · 2 min · Energising
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
Phrases and philosophies for the use of the young
Wilde in 1894, one wicked sentence after another, and most of them still land.
Oscar Wilde · 2 min · A delight
Pleasure is seldom found where it is sought
Johnson on why a planned evening of wit turns sour and a dream trip turns to dust, and why hope is worth keeping anyway.
Samuel Johnson · 3 min · Challenging
Politeness, if it is only fear of bad taste
A Japanese scholar explains manners to the West: not etiquette, but regard for what another person feels.
Inazo Nitobe · 2 min · Calm
Postponement is the greatest waste of life
We fit ourselves out for a life we keep putting off, and the day being lived gets spent on the one being planned.
Seneca · 2 min · Challenging
Remember
Rossetti's sonnet: remember me, and if remembering makes you sad, forget me and smile.
Christina Rossetti · 1 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
Seventy, reached by the wrong road
Twain explains his method for a long life and warns you it would kill you.
Mark Twain · 5 min · A delight
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
Sympathy
Dunbar, 1899: why the caged bird sings, and it is not a carol of joy.
Paul Laurence Dunbar · 1 min · Challenging
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
Take care of the minutes
A father writes to his son as a flapper, a tap on the shoulder, and turns a miser's rule about pennies into a rule for minutes.
Lord Chesterfield · 1 min · Practical
The best fives player who ever lived
Hazlitt's obituary for a handball champion, and the best case ever made for playing a game.
William Hazlitt · 1 min · A delight
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 complaint that life is too short
Nature is not stingy, Seneca tells his friend Paulinus: a great fortune handed to a bad master is gone at once, a small one in good hands grows.
Seneca · 2 min · Calm
The day it rained cobwebs
On 21 September 1741 the sky dropped flakes of web all day over three villages, and a parson naturalist works out that tiny spiders were flying on their own threads.
Gilbert White · 4 min · A delight
The cook who never sharpened his knife
After nineteen years his blade is still new, because he cuts only where the ox opens.
Zhuangzi · 2 min · Calm
The death of a government clerk
A clerk sneezes on a general at the opera, then cannot stop apologising. Chekhov at his funniest, and his cruellest.
Anton Chekhov · 5 min · A delight
The daffodils
Ten thousand daffodils by a lake, and the discovery years later that they can still be called back, lying still on a couch.
William Wordsworth · 1 min · Calm
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 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 perfect guest
Lucas confesses he is a poor house guest, then describes the ideal one, down to the biscuits left by the bed.
E. V. Lucas · 4 min · A delight
The only people who are really at leisure
Read the old philosophers, Seneca says, and you annex their centuries to your own — and not one of them is ever too busy to see you.
Seneca · 3 min · Calm
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 people history never records
Eliot's last paragraphs: the good of the world rests on acts nobody wrote down.
George Eliot · 1 min · Calm
The Tale of Peter Rabbit
The whole story, exactly as Beatrix Potter wrote it in 1902. Four minutes, one very bad rabbit.
Beatrix Potter · 5 min · A delight
The Twin Verses
The opening of the Dhammapada: you are what you have thought, and hatred never ends by hatred.
The Dhammapada · 3 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
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
Three funny-looking men at the door
After crossing South Georgia on foot, three ragged men walk into a whaling station. The boys run, the manager does not know them, and then one name changes everything.
Ernest Shackleton · 2 min · Energising
There Was a Child Went Forth
Everything a child looks at becomes part of him. Whitman lists it all, down to the salt marsh.
Walt Whitman · 3 min · Calm
Three maxims for a new habit
William James on how a habit takes root: start hard, allow no exception, act at the first chance.
William James · 2 min · Practical
To Autumn
Keats in three stanzas: ripeness, a drowsy harvest, and the swallows gathering to leave.
John Keats · 1 min · Calm
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
We Wear the Mask
Fifteen lines on the face you put on for everyone else.
Paul Laurence Dunbar · 1 min · Challenging
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 dear things sell
A Paris grocer asks forty francs for February asparagus and explains why the price is the point. Two Englishmen prove her right a minute later.
Brillat-Savarin · 1 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
Yes, novels
Austen stops her own story to defend the novel against everyone who sneers at it.
Jane Austen · 2 min · A delight
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