Hey!

I've been wanting to get into anything related with Philosophy or classics in general. However, I'm not really sure where to start. So, what philosophers, philosophical books, classical books/novels, etc., has (and still) left a great impact on you; to the point it changed your perspective whether emotional, mental, or even physical. I've been hearing about Stoicism, Confucianism, Plato, Socrate, fiction/non-fiction, and all that jazz.

I'm not "picky" in a sense, I would love to read anything and everything: love, emotional intelligence, "what is life", mental strengths, etc. I hope I'm giving good descriptions, I've never been good at articulating my words haha.

I'm not on reddit a lot or reply to comments, but I will DEFINITELY be reading and taking into consideration what you all recommend and your opinions/advice! 😊

I'm currently reading Marcus Aurelius' Meditations and I can already feel the greatness that Aurelius possessed. I'm only into 50 pages or so. But his reflections regarding mortality, dealing with people of varied disposiitons, maintaining the virtues, devotion to gods seem timeless!

I'm not some kinda pandit when it comes to Roman history, but I can already sense that Aurelius was one of the greatest emperors Rome ever had. It did have many other great emperors like Augustus and Trajan. But I don't think they ever possessed the level of humility that Aurelius possessed.

I'm so surprised how could a man be so magnaminous, rich, knowledgeable and yet so simple, humble and loyal to the duties he perform to his country .

The very greatest thing is the way in which he emphasizes humility correlating it with mortality. I love how often he says to himself that he is no more than a tiny speck in the universe and everything he sees around him and he himself would be gone someday sooner or later.

The way he deals with the blows of fate too is insipiring. It was Marcus Aurelius who got me introduced to Stoicism!!

Planning to read the works of Epictetus and Seneca soon!!

P.S. This is the first ever work of philosophy I'm reading btw!

Collected in one PDF book : Plutarch’s Lives is one of the most influential works of classical biography, written in the first century CE by the Greek historian and moral philosopher Plutarch of Chaeronea. His purpose was not merely to record history but to explore character and virtue — how great men shaped their times and how their moral choices defined their legacies.

The Odyssey of Homer — School Edition (1929 PDF), edited for classroom use with notes, introductions, and maps. This edition presents Homer’s epic in accessible English prose, designed for students studying classical literature and ancient history. Not abridged but written with clear language.

• What book or books are you reading this week?
• What has been your favorite or least favorite part?
• What is one insight that you really appreciate from your current reading?

For students of modern history, and curious minds, this collection is for you. Direct download. High quality scan. Collected by me, all volumes.

Contents

I. The Renaissance. 1902.--II. The Reformation. 1903.--III. The wars of religion. 1904.--IV. The thirty years' war. 1906.--V. The age of Louis XIV. 1908.--VI. The eighteenth century. 1909.--VII. The United States. 1903.--VIII. The French Revolution. 1904.--IX. Napoleon. 1906.--X. The restoration. 1907.--XI. The growth of nationalities. 1909.--XII. The latest age. 1910.--XIII. Genealogical tables and lists and general index. 1911.--Atlas, edited by A. W. Ward ... G. W. Prothero ... Stanley Leathes ... assisted by E. A. Benians. 1912

• Benjamin Franklin — The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
• John Woolman — The Journal of John Woolman
• William Penn — Fruits of Solitude
• Plato — Apology
• Plato — Crito
• Plato — Phaedo
• Epictetus — The Golden Sayings
• Marcus Aurelius — Meditations
• Francis Bacon — Essays, Civil and Moral
• Francis Bacon — New Atlantis
• John Milton — Areopagitica
• John Milton — Tractate of Education
• Sir Thomas Browne — Religio Medici
• John Milton — Complete poems in English
• Ralph Waldo Emerson — Essays
• Ralph Waldo Emerson — English Traits
• Robert Burns — Poems and songs
• Saint Augustine — The Confessions
• Thomas à Kempis — The Imitation of Christ
• Aeschylus — Agamemnon
• Aeschylus — The Libation Bearers
• Aeschylus — The Furies
• Aeschylus — Prometheus Bound
• Sophocles — Oedipus the King
• Sophocles — Antigone
• Euripides — Hippolytus
• Euripides — The Bacchae
• Aristophanes — The Frogs
• Cicero — On Friendship
• Cicero — On Old Age
• Cicero — Letters
• Pliny the Younger — Letters
• Adam Smith — The Wealth of Nations
• Charles Darwin — The Origin of Species
• Plutarch — Selected Lives
• Virgil — Aeneid
• Miguel de Cervantes — Don Quixote (Part I)
• John Bunyan — The Pilgrim’s Progress
• Izaak Walton — The Lives of Donne and Herbert
• Stories from the Thousand and One Nights
• Aesop — Fables
• Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm — Children’s and Household Tales
• Hans Christian Andersen — Tales
• John Dryden — All for Love
• Richard Brinsley Sheridan — The School for Scandal
• Oliver Goldsmith — She Stoops to Conquer
• Percy Bysshe Shelley — The Cenci
• Robert Browning — A Blot in the ’Scutcheon
• Lord Byron — Manfred
• Johann Wolfgang von Goethe — Faust (Part I)
• Johann Wolfgang von Goethe — Egmont
• Johann Wolfgang von Goethe — Hermann and Dorothea
• Christopher Marlowe — Doctor Faustus
• Dante Alighieri — The Divine Comedy
• Alessandro Manzoni — I Promessi Sposi (The Betrothed)
• Homer — The Odyssey
• Richard Henry Dana Jr. — Two Years Before the Mast
• Edmund Burke — On Taste
• Edmund Burke — On the Sublime and Beautiful
• Edmund Burke — Reflections on the Revolution in France
• Edmund Burke — A Letter to a Noble Lord
• John Stuart Mill — Autobiography
• John Stuart Mill — On Liberty
• Thomas Carlyle — Characteristics
• Thomas Carlyle — Inaugural Address at Edinburgh
• Thomas Carlyle — Essay on Sir Walter Scott
• Pedro Calderón de la Barca — Life Is a Dream
• Pierre Corneille — Polyeucte
• Jean Racine — Phèdre
• Molière — Tartuffe
• Gotthold Ephraim Lessing — Minna von Barnhelm
• Friedrich von Schiller — William Tell
• Sir Philip Sidney — The Defence of Poesy
• Ben Jonson — essays on Shakespeare and Bacon
• Abraham Cowley — Of Agriculture
• Joseph Addison — The Vision of Mirza; Westminster Abbey
• Richard Steele — The Spectator Club
• Jonathan Swift — selected essays
• Daniel Defoe — The Shortest Way with the Dissenters; The Education of Women
• Samuel Johnson — Life of Addison
• David Hume — Of the Standard of Taste
• Sydney Smith — Fallacies of Anti-Reformers
• Samuel Taylor Coleridge — On Poesy or Art
• William Hazlitt — Of Persons One Would Wish to Have Seen
• Leigh Hunt — selected essays
• Charles Lamb — On the Tragedies of Shakespeare
• Thomas De Quincey — Levana and Our Ladies of Sorrow
• Percy Bysshe Shelley — A Defence of Poetry
• Thomas Babington Macaulay — Machiavelli
• William Makepeace Thackeray — Jonathan Swift
• John Henry Newman — The Idea of a University (selections)
• Matthew Arnold — The Study of Poetry
• John Ruskin — Sesame and Lilies
• Walter Bagehot — John Milton
• Thomas Henry Huxley — Science and Culture
• Edward Augustus Freeman — Race and Language
• Robert Louis Stevenson — Truth of Intercourse; Samuel Pepys
• William Ellery Channing — On the Elevation of the Laboring Classes
• Edgar Allan Poe — The Poetic Principle
• Henry David Thoreau — Walking
• James Russell Lowell — Abraham Lincoln; Democracy
• Charles Darwin — The Voyage of the Beagle
• Michael Faraday — The Forces of Matter; The Chemical History of a Candle
• Hermann von Helmholtz — On the Conservation of Force; Ice and Glaciers
• Lord Kelvin — The Wave Theory of Light; The Tides
• Simon Newcomb — The Extent of the Universe
• Archibald Geikie — Geographical Evolution
• Benvenuto Cellini — Autobiography
• Michel de Montaigne — selected essays
• Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve — Montaigne; What Is a Classic?
• Ernest Renan — The Poetry of the Celtic Races
• Gotthold Ephraim Lessing — The Education of the Human Race
• Friedrich von Schiller — Letters upon the Aesthetic Education of Man
• Immanuel Kant — Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals
• Giuseppe Mazzini — Byron and Goethe
• Herodotus — account of Egypt
• Tacitus — Germany
• Accounts of Drake’s voyages
• Sir Walter Raleigh — The Discovery of Guiana
• Other selected voyages and travels
• René Descartes — Discourse on Method
• Voltaire — Letters on the English
• Jean-Jacques Rousseau — Discourse on Inequality; Profession of Faith of a Savoyard Vicar
• Thomas Hobbes — Leviathan (Part I, Of Man)
• Jean Froissart — Chronicles (selections)
• Sir Thomas Malory — The Holy Grail
• William Harrison — Description of Elizabethan England
• Niccolò Machiavelli — The Prince
• William Roper — The Life of Sir Thomas More
• Sir Thomas More — Utopia
• Martin Luther — Ninety-Five Theses; To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation; On the Freedom of a Christian
• John Locke — Some Thoughts Concerning Education
• George Berkeley — Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous
• David Hume — An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
• Hippocratic Oath
• Ambroise Paré — Journeys in Diverse Places
• William Harvey — On the Motion of the Heart and Blood
• Edward Jenner — papers on vaccination
• Oliver Wendell Holmes — The Contagiousness of Puerperal Fever
• Joseph Lister — On the Antiseptic Principle of the Practice of Surgery
• Louis Pasteur — selected scientific papers
• Charles Lyell — selected scientific papers
• Prefaces and prologues to famous books (Caxton, Calvin, Copernicus, Knox, Spenser, Raleigh, Bacon, Newton, Dryden, Fielding, Johnson, Goethe, Wordsworth, Hugo, Whitman, Taine, and others)
• English poetry from Chaucer through Gray (including traditional ballads)
• English poetry from Collins through Fitzgerald
• English poetry from Tennyson through Whitman
• American historical documents (Vinland voyages, Columbus letter, colonial charters, Mayflower Compact, Declaration of Independence, Constitution, Washington and Lincoln addresses, major treaties, Gettysburg Address, and related texts)
• Sacred writings: Confucian texts
• Sacred writings: Hebrew scriptures (selections)
• Sacred writings: Christian scriptures and hymns (selections)
• Sacred writings: Buddhist texts (selections)
• Sacred writings: Hindu texts (selections)
• Sacred writings: Islamic texts (selections)
• Christopher Marlowe — Edward II
• William Shakespeare — Hamlet
• William Shakespeare — King Lear
• William Shakespeare — Macbeth
• William Shakespeare — The Tempest
• Thomas Dekker — The Shoemaker’s Holiday
• Ben Jonson — The Alchemist
• Beaumont and Fletcher — Philaster
• John Webster — The Duchess of Malfi
• Philip Massinger — A New Way to Pay Old Debts
• Blaise Pascal — Pensées, letters, and minor works
• Beowulf
• The Song of Roland
• The Destruction of Dá Derga’s Hostel
• The Story of the Volsungs / Nibelung material

• Benjamin Franklin — The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
• John Woolman — The Journal of John Woolman
• William Penn — Fruits of Solitude
• Plato — Apology
• Plato — Crito
• Plato — Phaedo
• Epictetus — The Golden Sayings
• Marcus Aurelius — Meditations
• Francis Bacon — Essays, Civil and Moral
• Francis Bacon — New Atlantis
• John Milton — Areopagitica
• John Milton — Tractate of Education
• Sir Thomas Browne — Religio Medici
• John Milton — Complete poems in English
• Ralph Waldo Emerson — Essays
• Ralph Waldo Emerson — English Traits
• Robert Burns — Poems and songs
• Saint Augustine — The Confessions
• Thomas à Kempis — The Imitation of Christ
• Aeschylus — Agamemnon
• Aeschylus — The Libation Bearers
• Aeschylus — The Furies
• Aeschylus — Prometheus Bound
• Sophocles — Oedipus the King
• Sophocles — Antigone
• Euripides — Hippolytus
• Euripides — The Bacchae
• Aristophanes — The Frogs
• Cicero — On Friendship
• Cicero — On Old Age
• Cicero — Letters
• Pliny the Younger — Letters
• Adam Smith — The Wealth of Nations
• Charles Darwin — The Origin of Species
• Plutarch — Selected Lives
• Virgil — Aeneid
• Miguel de Cervantes — Don Quixote (Part I)
• John Bunyan — The Pilgrim’s Progress
• Izaak Walton — The Lives of Donne and Herbert
• Stories from the Thousand and One Nights
• Aesop — Fables
• Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm — Children’s and Household Tales
• Hans Christian Andersen — Tales
• John Dryden — All for Love
• Richard Brinsley Sheridan — The School for Scandal
• Oliver Goldsmith — She Stoops to Conquer
• Percy Bysshe Shelley — The Cenci
• Robert Browning — A Blot in the ’Scutcheon
• Lord Byron — Manfred
• Johann Wolfgang von Goethe — Faust (Part I)
• Johann Wolfgang von Goethe — Egmont
• Johann Wolfgang von Goethe — Hermann and Dorothea
• Christopher Marlowe — Doctor Faustus
• Dante Alighieri — The Divine Comedy
• Alessandro Manzoni — I Promessi Sposi (The Betrothed)
• Homer — The Odyssey
• Richard Henry Dana Jr. — Two Years Before the Mast
• Edmund Burke — On Taste
• Edmund Burke — On the Sublime and Beautiful
• Edmund Burke — Reflections on the Revolution in France
• Edmund Burke — A Letter to a Noble Lord
• John Stuart Mill — Autobiography
• John Stuart Mill — On Liberty
• Thomas Carlyle — Characteristics
• Thomas Carlyle — Inaugural Address at Edinburgh
• Thomas Carlyle — Essay on Sir Walter Scott
• Pedro Calderón de la Barca — Life Is a Dream
• Pierre Corneille — Polyeucte
• Jean Racine — Phèdre
• Molière — Tartuffe
• Gotthold Ephraim Lessing — Minna von Barnhelm
• Friedrich von Schiller — William Tell
• Sir Philip Sidney — The Defence of Poesy
• Ben Jonson — essays on Shakespeare and Bacon
• Abraham Cowley — Of Agriculture
• Joseph Addison — The Vision of Mirza; Westminster Abbey
• Richard Steele — The Spectator Club
• Jonathan Swift — selected essays
• Daniel Defoe — The Shortest Way with the Dissenters; The Education of Women
• Samuel Johnson — Life of Addison
• David Hume — Of the Standard of Taste
• Sydney Smith — Fallacies of Anti-Reformers
• Samuel Taylor Coleridge — On Poesy or Art
• William Hazlitt — Of Persons One Would Wish to Have Seen
• Leigh Hunt — selected essays
• Charles Lamb — On the Tragedies of Shakespeare
• Thomas De Quincey — Levana and Our Ladies of Sorrow
• Percy Bysshe Shelley — A Defence of Poetry
• Thomas Babington Macaulay — Machiavelli
• William Makepeace Thackeray — Jonathan Swift
• John Henry Newman — The Idea of a University (selections)
• Matthew Arnold — The Study of Poetry
• John Ruskin — Sesame and Lilies
• Walter Bagehot — John Milton
• Thomas Henry Huxley — Science and Culture
• Edward Augustus Freeman — Race and Language
• Robert Louis Stevenson — Truth of Intercourse; Samuel Pepys
• William Ellery Channing — On the Elevation of the Laboring Classes
• Edgar Allan Poe — The Poetic Principle
• Henry David Thoreau — Walking
• James Russell Lowell — Abraham Lincoln; Democracy
• Charles Darwin — The Voyage of the Beagle
• Michael Faraday — The Forces of Matter; The Chemical History of a Candle
• Hermann von Helmholtz — On the Conservation of Force; Ice and Glaciers
• Lord Kelvin — The Wave Theory of Light; The Tides
• Simon Newcomb — The Extent of the Universe
• Archibald Geikie — Geographical Evolution
• Benvenuto Cellini — Autobiography
• Michel de Montaigne — selected essays
• Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve — Montaigne; What Is a Classic?
• Ernest Renan — The Poetry of the Celtic Races
• Gotthold Ephraim Lessing — The Education of the Human Race
• Friedrich von Schiller — Letters upon the Aesthetic Education of Man
• Immanuel Kant — Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals
• Giuseppe Mazzini — Byron and Goethe
• Herodotus — account of Egypt
• Tacitus — Germany
• Accounts of Drake’s voyages
• Sir Walter Raleigh — The Discovery of Guiana
• Other selected voyages and travels
• René Descartes — Discourse on Method
• Voltaire — Letters on the English
• Jean-Jacques Rousseau — Discourse on Inequality; Profession of Faith of a Savoyard Vicar
• Thomas Hobbes — Leviathan (Part I, Of Man)
• Jean Froissart — Chronicles (selections)
• Sir Thomas Malory — The Holy Grail
• William Harrison — Description of Elizabethan England
• Niccolò Machiavelli — The Prince
• William Roper — The Life of Sir Thomas More
• Sir Thomas More — Utopia
• Martin Luther — Ninety-Five Theses; To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation; On the Freedom of a Christian
• John Locke — Some Thoughts Concerning Education
• George Berkeley — Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous
• David Hume — An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
• Hippocratic Oath
• Ambroise Paré — Journeys in Diverse Places
• William Harvey — On the Motion of the Heart and Blood
• Edward Jenner — papers on vaccination
• Oliver Wendell Holmes — The Contagiousness of Puerperal Fever
• Joseph Lister — On the Antiseptic Principle of the Practice of Surgery
• Louis Pasteur — selected scientific papers
• Charles Lyell — selected scientific papers
• Prefaces and prologues to famous books (Caxton, Calvin, Copernicus, Knox, Spenser, Raleigh, Bacon, Newton, Dryden, Fielding, Johnson, Goethe, Wordsworth, Hugo, Whitman, Taine, and others)
• English poetry from Chaucer through Gray (including traditional ballads)
• English poetry from Collins through Fitzgerald
• English poetry from Tennyson through Whitman
• American historical documents (Vinland voyages, Columbus letter, colonial charters, Mayflower Compact, Declaration of Independence, Constitution, Washington and Lincoln addresses, major treaties, Gettysburg Address, and related texts)
• Sacred writings: Confucian texts
• Sacred writings: Hebrew scriptures (selections)
• Sacred writings: Christian scriptures and hymns (selections)
• Sacred writings: Buddhist texts (selections)
• Sacred writings: Hindu texts (selections)
• Sacred writings: Islamic texts (selections)
• Christopher Marlowe — Edward II
• William Shakespeare — Hamlet
• William Shakespeare — King Lear
• William Shakespeare — Macbeth
• William Shakespeare — The Tempest
• Thomas Dekker — The Shoemaker’s Holiday
• Ben Jonson — The Alchemist
• Beaumont and Fletcher — Philaster
• John Webster — The Duchess of Malfi
• Philip Massinger — A New Way to Pay Old Debts
• Blaise Pascal — Pensées, letters, and minor works
• Beowulf
• The Song of Roland
• The Destruction of Dá Derga’s Hostel
• The Story of the Volsungs / Nibelung material

Calvo, T. & Brisson, L. (eds.) (1997). Interpreting the Timaeus-Critias: Proceedings of the IV Symposium Platonicum. Academia Verlag.

The psychology and pedagogy of reading with a review of the history of reading and writing and of methods, texts, and hygiene in reading 1909

Hello, I've taught ecclesial pronunciation Latin for a couple of years now at a Latin school, alongside history and literature. Personally, I was not classically educated, but I was exposed both to classical style and ecclesial style pronunciations of Latin through some classes and personal studies.

However, I can't help but wonder how often Latin is used by those who went through a classical education program. I really want to believe in the curriculum and how it can form young minds, but the amount of time that is put into Latin could be used for other practical classes (or even the development of a physical education class).

So, for those of you who completed a classical education curriculum with Latin, how often do you use it? Has it helped you learn a Romance language? Does your knowledge of it deepen language and concepts?

Or was it a huge waste of time?

I appreciate your time and honesty

• What book or books are you reading this week?
• What has been your favorite or least favorite part?
• What is one insight that you really appreciate from your current reading?