In the Odyssey, Homer’s epic about the family as the center of civilization portrays two ways of life—the civilized and the barbaric. The civilized dwell in homes, the barbaric in ...

In Robert Frost’s “After Apple-Picking” the narrator spends an entire day from morning till evening picking all the apples before the first frost of the season. He has spent the ...

A person can live in a narrow world or a wider universe. He can live in a state of stagnation with no goals or ambitions, or keep his life in ...

In The Way of a Storyteller Ruth Sawyer tells an anecdote about a gifted furniture maker renowned for his craftsmanship whose work was in great demand by the prominent and ...

This piece is transcribed from a commencement speech delivered by the author. In Lucretius’s famous words, “Nothing can come from nothing.” A hundred or a thousand or a million times ...

This 100th anniversary edition of Chesterton’s poetic version of King Alfred’s heroic defense of Christian England from the pagan Danes is an exquisite publication.It embellishes the famous narrative and provides ...

Simone Weil, a noted Jewish philosopher, remarked, “Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, ...

In A Wonder Book and The Tanglewood Tales Hawthorne retells some of the famous classical myths in an imaginative and charming style that captures the universality and moral wisdom of ...

One of the greatest of Catholic poets, Gerard Manley Hopkins, S.J., is best known for his appreciation of the beauty, variety, and individuality (“this-ness”) of God’s creation. As a poet ...

“It’s knowing what to do with things that counts.”—Robert Frost, “At Woodward’s Gardens” In Frost’s poem, “At Woodward’s Gardens,” a boy visiting a zoo carries a magnifying glass. From his ...

Sancho Panza, the comical squire of the illustrious Don Quixote who vowed to restore knight-errantry into a debased world and recover the Golden Age, once told his master, “An ass ...

“It is not enough that your actions are good. You must take care that they appear so.” In Henry Fielding’s novel Tom Jones, the wise Squire Allworthy offers this advice ...

One of the most famous statements of wisdom comes from Dr. Johnson, the eminent man of letters of the eighteenth century England who wrote Dictionary of the English Language, Lives ...

These articles will cite famous advice, wise proverbs, and prudent counsel as they appear in the classics of literature, in the words of famous characters from the good and great ...

The Cottage at Bantry Bay, Francie on the Run, and Pegeen are charming, wholesome, fun-filled tales of Catholic family life in 1940s Ireland that are humorous and heartwarming. In these ...