The Marginalian
The Marginalian

Reads tagged with “public domain”

How to Change Minds: Blaise Pascal on the Art of Persuasion
How to Change Minds: Blaise Pascal on the Art of Persuasion

“People are generally better persuaded by the reasons which they have themselves discovered than by those which have come into the mind of others.”

read article

Lewis Carroll on Happiness and How to Alleviate Our Discomfort with Change
Lewis Carroll on Happiness and How to Alleviate Our Discomfort with Change

“There’s no use in comparing one’s feelings between one day and the next; you must allow a reasonable interval, for the direction of change to show itself.”

read article

What to Do When Your Wife Is More Successful than You: Wise Advice from Tchaikovsky’s Father, 150 Years Ahead of Its Time
What to Do When Your Wife Is More Successful than You: Wise Advice from Tchaikovsky’s Father, 150 Years Ahead of Its Time

“Married happiness is based upon mutual respect, and you would no more permit your wife to be a kind of servant, than she would ask you to be her lackey.”

read article

The Spirit of Sauntering: Thoreau on the Art of Walking and the Perils of a Sedentary Lifestyle
The Spirit of Sauntering: Thoreau on the Art of Walking and the Perils of a Sedentary Lifestyle

Why “every walk is a sort of crusade.”

read article

Marcus Aurelius on What His Father Taught Him About Humility, Honor, Kindness, and Integrity
Marcus Aurelius on What His Father Taught Him About Humility, Honor, Kindness, and Integrity

What it takes to attain “the mark of a soul in readiness.”

read article

Stunning Cyanotypes of Sea Algae by the Self-Taught Victorian Botanist Anna Atkins, the First Woman Photographer and a Pioneer of Scientific Illustration
Stunning Cyanotypes of Sea Algae by the Self-Taught Victorian Botanist Anna Atkins, the First Woman Photographer and a Pioneer of Scientific Illustration

Beautiful blueness from a trailblazing woman in science.

read article

How to Work Through Difficulty: Lewis Carroll’s Three Tips for Overcoming Creative Block
How to Work Through Difficulty: Lewis Carroll’s Three Tips for Overcoming Creative Block

“When you have made a thorough and reasonably long effort, to understand a thing, and still feel puzzled by it, stop, you will only hurt yourself by going on.”

read article

Conscience and Spirit: Leo Tolstoy on Why Humans Drink
Conscience and Spirit: Leo Tolstoy on Why Humans Drink

“The seeing, spiritual being, whose manifestation we commonly call conscience, always points with one end towards right and with the other towards wrong, and we do not notice it while we follow the course it shows.”

read article

The History Manifesto: How to Eradicate the Epidemic of Short-Termism and Harness Our Past in Creating a Flourishing Future
The History Manifesto: How to Eradicate the Epidemic of Short-Termism and Harness Our Past in Creating a Flourishing Future

A beautiful case for why our flourishing requires that we move from pursuing value to cultivating values.

read article

Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch’s Three Rules of Writing and Four Elements of Style: Timeless Advice from 1914
Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch’s Three Rules of Writing and Four Elements of Style: Timeless Advice from 1914

“Persuasion — the highest form of persuasion at any rate — cannot be achieved without a sense of beauty.”

read article

View Full Site

The Marginalian participates in the Bookshop.org and Amazon.com affiliate programs, designed to provide a means for sites to earn commissions by linking to books. In more human terms, this means that whenever you buy a book from a link here, I receive a small percentage of its price, which goes straight back into my own colossal biblioexpenses. Privacy policy. (TLDR: You're safe — there are no nefarious "third parties" lurking on my watch or shedding crumbs of the "cookies" the rest of the internet uses.)