Richly exploited comic situations, effervescent wit, and intricate plots combine to make Sheridan's work among the best of of all English comedy. The School for Scandal (1777) is his masterpiece, a b ... 続きを読む

For I do not seek to understand so that I may believe; but I believe so that I may understand. For I believe this also, that unless I believe, I shall not understand.' Does God exist? Can we know ... 続きを読む

I concluded that I was a substance whose whole essence or nature resides only in thinking, and which, in order to exist, has no need of place and is not dependent on any material thing.' Descartes's ... 続きを読む

My present intention is to clear myself of any suspicion of partiality by presenting the views of the generality of philosophers concerning the nature of the gods.' Cicero's philosophical works are no ... 続きを読む

'I treat the narrative of the Lives as a kind of mirror...The experience is like nothing so much as spending time in their company and living with them: I receive and welcome each of them in turn as m ... 続きを読む

the fates ordained the founding of this great city and the beginning of the world's mightiest empire, second only to the power of the gods' Romulus and Remus, the rape of Lucretia, Horatius at the bri ... 続きを読む

No one can write a man's life except himself.' In his Confessions Jean-Jacques Rousseau tells the story of his life, from the formative experience of his humble childhood in Geneva, through the achiev ... 続きを読む

War is merely the continuation of policy by other means' On War is one of the most important books ever written on the subject of war. Clausewitz, a Prussian officer who fought against the French dur ... 続きを読む

They lived in a kind of hieroglyphic world, where the real thing was never said or done or even thought, but only represented by a set of arbitrary signs.' Edith Wharton's most famous novel, written ... 続きを読む

Our virtues are, most often, only vices in disguise.' Deceptively brief and insidiously easy to read, La Rochefoucauld's shrewd, unflattering analyses of human behaviour have influenced writers, thin ... 続きを読む