“As if a man could choose not only his wife but his wife’s husband!”
“You people have all been brainwashed. I imagine that you’d like to become a success or something equally vile.”
Emma by Jane Austen
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
Middlemarch by George Eliot
A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
Short Stories
“The text of Cervantes and that of Menard are verbally identical, but the second is almost infinitely richer.”
Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote by Jorge Luis Borges
Essays
“A few clear ideas are worth more than many confused ones.”
Of the Inconsistency of Our Actions by Michel de Montaigne
The Idea of Perfection by Iris Murdoch
How to Make Our Ideas Clear by Charles Sanders Peirce
Trotsky and the Wild Orchids by Richard Rorty
A Modest Proposal by Jonathan Swift
Philosophy
“A philosophical doctrine begins as a plausible description of the universe; with the passage of the years it becomes a mere chapter — if not a paragraph or a name — in the history of philosophy.”
“One should stop worrying about whether what one believes is well grounded and start worrying about whether one has been imaginative enough to think up interesting alternatives to one’s present beliefs.”
Nicomachean Ethics by Aristotle
After Virtue by Alasdair MacIntyre
Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity by Richard Rorty
Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature by Richard Rorty
Nonfiction
The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham
Poetry
“We must endure our thoughts all night, until / The bright obvious stands motionless in cold.”
“Just as sound, when pent up in the narrow channel of a trumpet, comes out sharper and stronger, so it seems to me that a thought, when compressed into the numbered feet of poetry, springs forth much more violently and strikes me a much stiffer jolt.”