Quick Excerpts, from a Library of 492 Titles

Generated 2022-07-28 13:24:03

Excerpt #1, from Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, by William Shakespeare

…OPHELIA. My honour’d lord, you know right well you did, And with them words of so sweet breath compos’d As made the things more rich; their perfume lost, Take these again; for to the noble mind Rich gifts wax poor when givers prove unkind. There, my lord. HAMLET. Ha, ha! Are you honest? OPHELIA. My lord? HAMLET. Are you fair? OPHELIA. What means your lordship? HAMLET. That if you be honest and fair, your honesty should admit no discourse to your beauty. OPHELIA. Could beauty, my lord, have better commerce than with honesty? HAMLET. Ay, truly; for the power of beauty will sooner transform honesty from what it is to a bawd than the force of honesty can translate beauty into his likeness. This was sometime a paradox, but now the time gives it proof. I did love you once. OPHELIA. Indeed, my lord, you made me believe so. HAMLET. You should not have believed me; for virtue cannot so inoculate our old stock but we shall relish of it. I loved you not. OPHELIA. I was the more deceived. HAMLET. Get thee to a nunnery. Why wouldst thou be a breeder of sinners? I am myself indifferent honest; but yet I could accuse me of…

More: Read or Listen on IA →

Excerpt #2, from Man and Superman: A Comedy and a Philosophy, by Bernard Shaw

…was preceded by a very convincing demonstration that the artist never catches the point of view of the common man on the question of sex, because he is not in the same predicament. I first prove that anything I write on the relation of the sexes is sure to be misleading; and then I proceed to write a Don Juan play. Well, if you insist on asking me why I behave in this absurd way, I can only reply that you asked me to, and that in any case my treatment of the subject may be valid for the artist, amusing to the amateur, and at least intelligible and therefore possibly suggestive to the Philistine. Every man who records his illusions is providing data for the genuinely scientific psychology which the world still waits for. I plank down my view of the existing relations of men to women in the most highly civilized society for what it is worth. It is a view like any other view and no more, neither true nor false, but, I hope, a way of looking at the subject which throws into the familiar order of cause and effect a sufficient body of fact and experience to be interesting to you, if not to the play-going public of London. I have certainly shown little consideration for that public in this enterprise; but I know that it has the friendliest disposition towards you and me as far as it has any consciousness of our existence, and quite understands that what I write for you must pass at a considerable height over its simple romantic head. It will take my books…

More: Read or Listen on IA →

Excerpt #3, from The Critique of Pure Reason, by Immanuel Kant

…external sense, that is, the subjective condition of the sensibility, under which alone external intuition is possible. Now, because the receptivity or capacity of the subject to be affected by objects necessarily antecedes all intuitions of these objects, it is easily understood how the form of all phenomena can be given in the mind previous to all actual perceptions, therefore à priori, and how it, as a pure intuition, in which all objects must be determined, can contain principles of the relations of these objects prior to all experience. It is therefore from the human point of view only that we can speak of space, extended objects, etc. If we depart from the subjective condition, under which alone we can obtain external intuition, or, in other words, by means of which we are affected by objects, the representation of space has no meaning whatsoever. This predicate is only applicable to things in so far as they appear to us, that is, are objects of sensibility. The constant form of this receptivity, which we call sensibility, is a necessary condition of all relations in which objects can be intuited as existing without us, and when abstraction of these objects is made, is a pure intuition, to which we give the name of space. It is clear that we cannot make the special conditions of sensibility into conditions of the possibility of things, but only of the possibility of their existence as far as they are phenomena. And so…

More: Read or Listen on IA →

Excerpt #4, from A Humorous History of England, by Charles Harrison

…They coalesced in eight-two-seven. [Illustration: IRON JELLOIDS The Great Tonic] Alfred Of good King Alfred we’ve all heard 872-901 How when hiding he incurred A lady’s anger for not taking Care of Cakes which she was baking. (Most probably she left the King While she went out a-gossiping.) Before he died in nine-nought-one, Old England’s Navy had begun. He laid a tax on every town To aid his fleet to gain renown. He was the best of Saxon Kings And did a lot of useful things; Built Oxford with its noble spires And mapped out England into Shires. Danes In seven-eight-three first came the Danes 783 Who caused the Saxons aches and pains. They sailed right up our rivers broad, Putting the natives to the sword. “Danegeld” For centuries our sadly fated…

More: Read or Listen on IA →

Excerpt #5, from Essays of Michel de Montaigne — Complete, by Michel de Montaigne

…in his house, and in his ordinary actions, for which we are accountable to none, and where there is no study nor artifice. And therefore Bias, setting forth the excellent state of a private family, says: “of which a the master is the same within, by his own virtue and temper, that he is abroad, for fear of the laws and report of men.” And it was a worthy saying of Julius Drusus, to the masons who offered him, for three thousand crowns, to put his house in such a posture that his neighbours should no longer have the same inspection into it as before; “I will give you,” said he, “six thousand to make it so that everybody may see into every room.” ‘Tis honourably recorded of Agesilaus, that he used in his journeys always to take up his lodgings in temples, to the end that the people and the gods themselves might pry into his most private actions. Such a one has been a miracle to the world, in whom neither his wife nor servant has ever seen anything so much as remarkable; few men have been admired by their own domestics; no one was ever a prophet, not merely in his own house, but in his own country, says the experience of histories: –[No man is a hero to his valet-de-chambre, said Marshal Catinat]–‘tis the same in things of nought, and in this low example the image of a greater is to be seen. In my country of Gascony, they look upon it as a drollery to see me in print; the further off I am read from my own home, the better I am esteemed. I purchase printers in Guienne; elsewhere they…

More: Read or Listen on IA →

Excerpt #6, from An Introduction to the History of Science, by Walter Libby

…(B) Imagination Poesy (C) Memory History ————————————————————————— Philosophia prima, or sapience —–+—+——–+———————-+——————————— (A) | | | Civil Philosophy | Intercourse | N | | (Standards of | Business | a | | right in:) | Government | t | Man +—————+——+——————————— | u | | Philosophy | Body | Medicine, Athletics, etc. | r | | of Humanity +——+——————————— | a | | (Anthropology)| | Logic | l | | | Soul | | | | | | Ethics | P +——–+————-+-+——+——–+———-+————- | h | | | Physics | Concrete | | i | | | (Material and | | M | l | | | Secondary | Abstract | a | o | | | Causes) | | t | s | Nature | Speculative | | | h | o | | | Metaphysics | Concrete | e…

More: Read or Listen on IA →

Excerpt #7, from Uncle Wiggily’s Travels, by Howard Roger Garis

…that bug flies so fast that soon all my friends will be here," said the rabbit, so he and the pussy began to get the lunch ready. Uncle Wiggily had some food in his valise, but they got more good things from a kind old monkey who lived in the woods. He used to work on a hand organ, but when he got old he bought him a nest in the woods with the pennies he had saved up, and he lived in peace and quietness, and played a mouth organ on Sundays. Well, you will hardly believe me, but it’s true, no sooner had Uncle Wiggily and the pussy put up the lunch, wrapping some for each visitor in nice, green grape leaves, than the first ones of the picnic party began to arrive. They were Dickie and Nellie Chip-Chip, the sparrows, for they could fly through the air very quickly, and so they came on ahead. “We got your invitation that the July bug left us, Uncle Wiggily, and we came at once,” said Dickie. “Where are the others?” asked the old gentleman rabbit. “They are coming,” answered Nellie, as she tied her tail ribbon over again, for the bow knot had become undone as she was flying through the air. Well, in a little while along came hopping, Sammie and Susie Littletail, the rabbit children, and Billie and Johnnie Bushytail, the squirrel brothers, and Bully and Bawly the frogs, and Dottie and Munchie Trot, the…

More: Read or Listen on IA →

Excerpt #8, from The Merchant of Venice, by William Shakespeare

…neither. JESSICA. And what hope is that, I pray thee? LAUNCELET. Marry, you may partly hope that your father got you not, that you are not the Jew’s daughter. JESSICA. That were a kind of bastard hope indeed; so the sins of my mother should be visited upon me. LAUNCELET. Truly then I fear you are damn’d both by father and mother; thus when I shun Scylla your father, I fall into Charybdis your mother. Well, you are gone both ways. JESSICA. I shall be saved by my husband. He hath made me a Christian. LAUNCELET. Truly the more to blame he, we were Christians enow before, e’en as many as could well live one by another. This making of Christians will raise the price of hogs; if we grow all to be pork-eaters, we shall not shortly have a rasher on the coals for money. Enter Lorenzo….

More: Read or Listen on IA →

Excerpt #9, from Roughing It in the Bush, by Susanna Moodie

…inclined to this opinion. He always paced the public streets with a slow, deliberate tread, and with his eyes fixed intently on the ground–like a man who had lost his ideas, and was diligently employed in searching for them. I chanced to meet him one day in this dreamy mood. “How do you do, Mr. Wilson?” He stared at me for several minutes, as if doubtful of my presence or identity. “What was that you said?” I repeated the question; and he answered, with one of his incredulous smiles– “Was it to me you spoke? Oh, I am quite well, or I should not be walking here. By the way, did you see my dog?” “How should I know your dog?” “They say he resembles me. He’s a queer dog, too; but I never could find out the likeness. Good night!” This was at noonday; but Tom had a habit of taking light for darkness, and darkness for light, in all he did or said. He must have had different eyes and ears, and a different way of seeing, hearing, and comprehending, than is possessed by the generality of his species; and to such a length did he carry this abstraction of soul and sense, that he would often leave you abruptly in the…

More: Read or Listen on IA →

Excerpt #10, from Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain

…over it. Then he says: “Well, den, I reck’n I did dream it, Huck; but dog my cats ef it ain’t de powerfullest dream I ever see. En I hain’t ever had no dream b’fo’ dat’s tired me like dis one.” “Oh, well, that’s all right, because a dream does tire a body like everything sometimes. But this one was a staving dream; tell me all about it, Jim.” So Jim went to work and told me the whole thing right through, just as it happened, only he painted it up considerable. Then he said he must start in and “’terpret” it, because it was sent for a warning. He said the first towhead stood for a man that would try to do us some good, but the current was another man that would get us away from him. The whoops was warnings that would come to us every now and then, and if we didn’t try hard to make out to understand them they’d just take us into bad luck, ’stead of keeping us out of it. The lot of towheads was troubles we was going to get into with quarrelsome people and all kinds of mean folks, but if we minded our business and didn’t talk back and aggravate them, we would pull through and get out of the fog and into the big clear river, which was the free States, and wouldn’t have no more trouble. It had clouded up pretty dark just after I got on to the raft, but it…

More: Read or Listen on IA →

Excerpt #11, from Don Juan, by Baron George Gordon Byron Byron

…And thus Gulbeyaz, though she knew not why, Felt an odd glistening moisture in her eye. But tears must stop like all things else; and soon Juan, who for an instant had been moved To such a sorrow by the intrusive tone Of one who dared to ask if ‘he had loved,’ Call’d back the stoic to his eyes, which shone Bright with the very weakness he reproved; And although sensitive to beauty, he Felt most indignant still at not being free. Gulbeyaz, for the first time in her days, Was much embarrass’d, never having met In all her life with aught save prayers and praise; And as she also risk’d her life to get Him whom she meant to tutor in love’s ways Into a comfortable tete-a-tete, To lose the hour would make her quite a martyr, And they had wasted now almost a quarter. I also would suggest the fitting time To gentlemen in any such like case, That is to say in a meridian clime—…

More: Read or Listen on IA →

Excerpt #12, from The Tale of Genji, by Murasaki Shikibu

…distressed and disquieted her by his wild behaviour, and feeling thoroughly ashamed of himself he answered: ‘I am afraid I know very little about these questions of rank and precedence. Such things are too confusing to carry in one’s head. And whatever you may have heard of me I want to tell you for some reason or other I have till this day cared nothing for gallantry nor ever practised it, and that even you cannot be more astonished at what I have done to-night than I myself am.’ With this and a score of other speeches he sought to win her confidence. But she, knowing that if once their talk became a jot less formal, she would be hard put to it to withstand his singular charm, was determined, even at the risk of seeming stiff and awkward, to show him that in trying so hard to put her at her ease he was only wasting his time, with the result that she behaved very boorishly indeed. She was by nature singularly gentle and yielding, so that the effort of steeling her heart and despite her feelings, playing all the while the part of the young bamboo-shoot which though so green and tender cannot be broken, was very painful to her; and finding that she could not longer think of arguments with which to withstand his importunity, she burst into tears; and though he was very sorry for her, it occurred to him that he would not gladly have missed that sight. He longed however to console her, but could not think of a way…

More: Read or Listen on IA →

A production of Friendlyskies.net