Comprising dozens of thousands of texts and parchments, the Library stood for centuries as the world’s learning hub. It was an unprecedented endeavor that stays alive in the books of history as well as in our imagination, millennia after its destruction.
Our Enchiridion – The Handbook series is built around the words of authors and thinkers who helped shape Western culture. Thus we decided to list all thirty sources from Vol. 1 according to their average ratings on Goodreads in order to find out which work is the best among the best!
Diogenes Laërtius’ Lives of the Eminent Philosophers is one of the most comprehensive biographical works on the Greco-Roman thinkers of antiquity. Here are ten of the best quotes found in Lives to make your day more philosophical.
Friar, fanatic, despot, martyr, heretic – many are the titles that throughout history have accompanied the name of Girolamo Savonarola, a figure that still baffles many historians both secular and religious to this very day. A Dominican monk sent to Florence in 1481, Savonarola gradually became the most influential preacher in the city, enthralling his listeners with vociferous disapproval of Florence’s immorality and political corruption.
While it is hard to predict how the political landscape of Italy would change, it becomes evident that not even all the kingdoms, duchies, republics, marquisates and bishoprics of Italy could have defended Alexander VI against the anti-Papal forces.
One of the most acute commentaries on Savonarola is made by none other than G. K. Chesterton in his book, Twelve Types. Here the English author distinguishes the historical Savonarola from the moral Savonarola, ignoring the former and focusing almost exclusively on the latter.
Abraham is for Christians an example of faith, with an incredible story of hope in the midst of adversity. Kierkegaard, however, goes beyond just that. In what many consider to be his magnum opus, the Danish philosopher expresses his tremendous admiration for the man he calls a “knight of faith.”
Few novels have chapters so rich and impacting they can stand apart from the rest of the book, yet this is precisely what has happened with the story of “The Grand Inquisitor,” from Fyodor Dostoevsky’s final novel, The Brothers Karamazov.
Quo Vadis, one of Henryk Sienkiewicz’s most appraised novels, is a tour de force that will take you back to Nero’s Rome, in a magnificent story where love and faith triumph even over the Emperor’s madness.
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