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Montaigne
- Narrated by: Tyler Boss
- Length: 2 hrs and 52 mins
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Publisher's summary
"The others form the human being, I depict him; and here I present an individual who is quite poorly formed and whom I would certainly make largely differently if I had to reshape him. But now that's the way he is."
This phrase from the famous essays of Michel de Montaigne outlines the character of the author and his work. Montaigne wrote his essays not from a position of certainty but from an awareness of his inadequacy. He thus reveals a level of critical self-reflection that, before his time, was rarely put on paper. Stefan Zweig dedicated a character study to this Michel de Montaigne, this French nobleman and freethinker among the religious dogmatists and political quarrels of the 16th century. With Montaigne in 1942, Stefan Zweig laid the capstone of his essayistic biographical work, although it remained a fragment.
The audiobook is based on the English translation from Vanessa Walsh from 2021.
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Deep and thought provoking.
- By Holly Stockley on 04-24-19
By: Anthony Esolen
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Why We Are Restless
- On the Modern Quest for Contentment
- By: Benjamin Storey, Jenna Silber Storey
- Narrated by: Laurel Lefkow
- Length: 6 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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We live in an age of unprecedented prosperity, yet everywhere we see signs that our pursuit of happiness has proven fruitless. Dissatisfied, we seek change for the sake of change - even if it means undermining the foundations of our common life. In Why We Are Restless, Benjamin and Jenna Storey offer a profound and beautiful reflection on the roots of this malaise and examine how we might begin to cure ourselves.
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Good primer.
- By Chris on 09-29-21
By: Benjamin Storey, and others
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The Gay Science (The Joyful Wisdom)
- By: Friedrich Nietzsche
- Narrated by: Michael Lunts
- Length: 10 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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The Gay Science (The Joyful Wisdom) is one of Nietzsche's greatest books. His wonderfully fertile mind roams over mankind, his thoughts, his emotions, his behaviour and his weaknesses with remarkable clarity, with insight - but also with humour!In this work are 383 separate paragraphs, some short, some long, but all singular observations - the epitome of his famous aphoristic style. 'Morality is the herd instinct in the individual.'
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I am now a full-fledged fan of Nietzsche
- By RS on 02-24-18
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Self-Reliance and Other Essays (AmazonClassics Edition)
- By: Ralph Waldo Emerson
- Narrated by: Mikael Naramore
- Length: 7 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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In this definitive collection of essays, including the poignant title essay "Self-Reliance," Ralph Waldo Emerson expounds on the importance of trusting your soul, as well as divine providence, to carve out a life. A firm believer in nonconformity, Emerson celebrates the individual and stresses the value of listening to the inner voice unique to each of us—even when it defies society's expectations.
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This book is like a series of great quotes!
- By M. Allen on 01-16-19
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Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely
- By: Andrew S. Curran
- Narrated by: Paul Boehmer
- Length: 13 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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Denis Diderot is often associated with the decades-long battle to bring the world's first comprehensive Encyclopedie into existence. But his most daring writing took place in the shadows. Thrown into prison for his atheism in 1749, Diderot decided to reserve his best books for posterity - for us, in fact. In the astonishing cache of unpublished writings left behind after his death, Diderot challenged virtually all of his century's accepted truths, from the sanctity of monarchy, to the racial justification of the slave trade, to the norms of human sexuality.
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lifelong coverage of his life.
- By Michael Daly on 03-22-21
By: Andrew S. Curran
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The Roman Way
- By: Edith Hamilton
- Narrated by: Nadia May
- Length: 6 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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Edith Hamilton shows us Rome through the eyes of the Romans. Plautus and Terence, Cicero and Caesar, Catullus, Horace, Virgil, and Augustus come to life in their ambitions, their work, their loves and hates. In them we see reflected a picture of Roman life very different from that fixed in our minds through schoolroom days, and far livelier.
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Not so bad
- By steve on 04-25-11
By: Edith Hamilton
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The Swerve
- How the World Became Modern
- By: Stephen Greenblatt
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
- Length: 9 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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Nearly six hundred years ago, a short, genial, cannily alert man in his late 30s took a very old manuscript off a library shelf, saw with excitement what he had discovered, and ordered that it be copied. That book was the last surviving manuscript of an ancient Roman philosophical epic by Lucretius—a beautiful poem containing the most dangerous ideas: that the universe functioned without the aid of gods, that religious fear was damaging to human life, and that matter was made up of very small particles.
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Very compelling history, a less compelling thesis
- By A reader on 05-01-12
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The Education of Henry Adams
- By: Henry Adams
- Narrated by: David Colacci
- Length: 19 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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As a journalist, historian, and novelist born into a family that included two past presidents of the United States, Henry Adams was constantly focused on the American experiment. An immediate bestseller awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1919, The Education of Henry Adams recounts his own and the country's education from 1838, the year of his birth, to 1905, incorporating the Civil War, capitalist expansion, and the growth of the United States as a world power.
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A Book EVERYONE should read once.
- By Darwin8u on 04-17-12
By: Henry Adams
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The Man Who Invented Fiction
- How Cervantes Ushered in the Modern World
- By: William Egginton
- Narrated by: Michael Butler Murray
- Length: 8 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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In the early 17th century, a crippled, graying, almost toothless veteran of Spain's wars against the Ottoman Empire published a novel. It was the story of a poor nobleman, his brain addled from studying too many novels of chivalry, who deludes himself that he is a knight errant and sets off on hilarious adventures. That story, Don Quixote, went on to sell more copies than any other book beside the Bible, making its author, Miguel de Cervantes, the single most-read author in human history.
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Very Interesting and Informative, but Poorly Read
- By LCorSMT on 06-21-23
By: William Egginton
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Prince Albert
- The Man Who Saved the Monarchy
- By: A. N. Wilson
- Narrated by: Gareth Armstrong
- Length: 13 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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Drawn from the Royal archives, including Prince Albert’s voluminous correspondence, this brilliant and ambitious book offers fascinating never-before-known details about the man and his time. A superb match of biographer and subject, Prince Albert, at last, gives this important historical figure the reverence and recognition that is long overdue.
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Excellent Bio!
- By Nancy on 04-24-24
By: A. N. Wilson