Reading the comments on my post The 50 books that changed the world , I think it is a good idea to ask the following question, so you can share with others:
One doesn’t love in order to do what is good or to help or to protect someone. If we act that way, we are perceiving the other as a simple object, and we seeing ourselves as wise and generous persons. This has nothing to do with love. To love is to be in communion with the other and to discover in that other the spark of God.
I could have. What does this phrase mean? At any given moment in our lives, there are certain things that could have happened but didn’t. The magic moments go unrecognized, and then suddenly, the hand of destiny changes everything.
But love is much like a dam: if you allow a tiny crack to form through which only a trickle of water can pass, that trickle will quickly bring down the whole structure, and soon no one will be able to control the force of the current.
Love is a trap. When it appears, we see only its light, not its shadows.
quotes from “By the river Piedra I sat down and wept”
For centuries, books have been written in an attempt to share knowledge, inspiration, and discoveries. Sometimes those books make such an impact that they change the way the world thinks about things. The following books have done just that by providing readers an education in politics and government, literature, society, academic subjects such as science and math, and religion.
1. The Republic by Plato.
2. The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.
3. The Rights of Man by Thomas Paine.
4. Common Sense by Thomas Paine.
5. Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville.
6. The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli.
7. Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriett Beecher Stowe.
8. On Liberty by John Stewart Mill.
9. Das Kapital by Karl Marx.
10. The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith.
11. Guerilla Warfare by Che Guevara.
12. The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer.
13. Lady Chatterley’s Lover by DH Lawrence.
14. Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri.
15. The Complete Works of William Shakespeare.
16. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe.
17. Moby Dick by Herman Melville.
18. 1984 by George Orwell.
19. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley.
20. Iliad and Odyssey by Homer.
21. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes.
22. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens.
23. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert.
24. The Arabian Nights Entertainment by Andrew Lang.
25. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy.
26. The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupry.
27. The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho.
28. Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank.
29. Survival in Auschwitz by Primo Levi.
30. The Vindication of the Rights of Women by Mary Wollstonecraft.
31. The Second xxx by Simone de Beauvoir.
32. A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf.
33. Walden by Henry David Thoreau.
34. A Dictionary of the English Language by Samuel Johnson.
35. Philosophae Naturalis Principia Mathematica by Isaac Newton.
36. The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud.
37. On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin.
38. Silent Spring by Rachel Carson.
39. Geographia by Ptolemy.
40. The Meaning of Relativity by Albert Einstein.
41. The Bible.
42. The Qur’an.
43. The Torah.
44. The Tibetan Book of the Dead.
45. The Analects of Confucius.
46. The Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas.
47. The Bhagavad Gita.
48. I Ching.
49. Tao Te Ching.
BONUS:
50. Bartleby by Hermann Melville.
