Free summaries
Essays, Letters & Speeches — page 5
1,469 public-domain essays, letters & speeches books, summarised. Page 5 of 31.
Alarms and Discursions
G. K. (Gilbert Keith) Chesterton
A grey, goggle-eyed gargoyle lying forgotten in cathedral grass becomes the doorway to a spirited defense of everyday wonder, sanity, and human scale.
Steep Trails
John Muir
A naturalist's journey through the untamed West, where mountains whisper ancient secrets and rivers carve stories into the earth.
Essays in Zen Buddhism
Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki
Beyond mere philosophy or quiet meditation lies an immediate, transformative experience of truth that shatters conceptual dualism and awakens the mind to its own original nature.
A Letter Book: Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing
George Saintsbury
A private letter is a delicate, living thing—part conversation, part portrait, and entirely human. This anthology traces how five centuries of writers turned personal correspondence into an enduring art form.
Women and the Alphabet: A Series of Essays
Thomas Wentworth Higginson
Barring women from full participation in public life is not a law of nature, but an obsolete habit waiting to be broken.
Italian Fantasies
Israel Zangwill
A wanderer traverses the Alpine passes into the sunlit Italian plains, carrying a heavy mantle of art, history, and philosophical doubt.
Unspoken Sermons, Series I., II., and III
George MacDonald
A radical Scottish theologian strips away centuries of rigid dogma to reveal a God whose love is a burning, inescapable fire of absolute redemption.
The Ghosts, and Other Lectures
Robert Green Ingersoll
A fierce defense of individual liberty and human reason, this collection dismantles religious orthodoxies to argue that true moral progress belongs to the brave, curious, and compassionate.
Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark
Mary Wollstonecraft
A mother travels through northern Europe with her infant, observing harsh rocks and quiet towns while carrying an unspoken weight of personal heartbreak across foreign lands.
Thoughts: Selected from the writings of favorite authors
Fabiola hospital association, Oakland, Calif.
A quiet refuge built from the finest wisdom of the ages, offering daily strength, moral clarity, and steadfast hope for any reader seeking to refine their inner life.
The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant: Being a collection of select pieces from our best modern writers, calculated to eradicate vulgar prejudices and rusticity of manners, improve the understanding, rectify the will, purify the passions, direct the minds of youth to the pursuit of proper objects, and to facilitate their reading, writing, and speaking the English language with elegance and propriety
John Hamilton Moore
A refined mind requires deliberate cultivation, turning raw potential into polished virtue, fluent speech, and graceful conduct. This eighteenth-century anthology guides young readers away from rustic ignorance and toward moral elegance.
Letters on England
Voltaire
An observant French traveler turns a sharp, appreciative eye upon the religious, political, scientific, and literary institutions of eighteenth-century Britain.
Marcel Proust, an English Tribute
Unknown
This collection gathers the voices of twenty-one prominent English-language writers and critics to assess the monumental achievement of a French novelist whose work reshaped the modern consciousness. It serves as an early, profound effort to map the vast, labyrinthine terrain of a literary giant.
Essays on Russian Novelists
William Lyon Phelps
Russian literature stands as a giant recently awakened, offering the world a profound intellectual depth that far outweighs the fleeting victories of war or industry. This collection of essays serves as a dedicated guide to the titans of the Russian spirit, exploring how a nation with a history spanning centuries…
Adventures and Enthusiasms
E. V. (Edward Verrall) Lucas
The world is filled with small, overlooked wonders, and these essays invite the reader to pause, observe, and find the quiet pulse of life in the ordinary. It is a collection that rewards the curious mind.
Cicero: Letters to Atticus, Vol. 2 of 3
Marcus Tullius Cicero
The Roman Republic collapses in real time through the frantic, private correspondence of its greatest orator, capturing the intimate terror of a statesman watching his world dissolve into civil war.
The gift of friendship
Unknown
The profound, often quiet, and frequently demanding nature of human connection is explored here through the eyes of history’s most thoughtful observers. These reflections offer a rare map for the heart’s most sacred territory.
A vindication of the rights of men, in a letter to the Right Honourable Edmund Burke
Mary Wollstonecraft
This impassioned retort dismantles the arguments of a famous statesman, fiercely defending the French Revolution and the inherent, natural rights of all humanity against the stifling weight of tradition and hereditary privilege.
Dante. An essay. To which is added a translation of De Monarchia
Dante Alighieri
This volume offers a dual perspective on a towering figure of Western literature: a discerning biographical essay followed by a translation of a seminal political treatise. It provides a rare, grounded look at how one of history’s greatest poets grappled with the fractured power structures of his time.
A Dish of Orts
George MacDonald
A collection of essays and lectures, this volume serves as a thoughtful meditation on the nature of art, the function of the imagination, and the pursuit of a life lived in accordance with truth.
Prefaces and prologues to famous books
Unknown
This collection gathers the most vital prefatory writings in Western history, offering a rare, intimate look at the minds of legendary authors as they step down from their platforms to address their readers directly.
The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters
Gustave Flaubert
This collection of correspondence captures a profound, decade-long intellectual intimacy between two of France’s most celebrated literary figures, revealing how they sustained one another through the fractures of the nineteenth century. It is a rare, unvarnished portrait of two minds meeting across the divide of…
Essays on education and kindred subjects
Herbert Spencer
Education should not be a rigid adherence to fashion, but a deliberate, scientific preparation for the complex realities of survival, social responsibility, and the cultivation of the human spirit.
Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z
Unknown
These collected addresses capture the wit, rhetoric, and social fabric of an era where the public dinner was the primary stage for intellectual and political life. They offer a window into a time when oratory was both a demanding craft and a celebrated form of community entertainment.
Between Heathenism and Christianity: Being a translation of Seneca's De Providentia, and Plutarch's De sera numinis vindicta, together with notes, additional extracts from these writers and two essays on Graeco-Roman life in the first century after Christ
Plutarch
The ancient world grappled with the same existential questions as our own: Why do the virtuous suffer while the wicked often thrive, and how does one maintain integrity in a corrupt society?
![Cover of In the American jungle [1925-1936]](https://cdn.myebooksbuy.com/c/in-the-american-jungle-1925-1936-waldo-david-frank.webp)
In the American jungle [1925-1936]
Waldo David Frank
The American landscape is a turbulent, untamed territory where the promise of progress often masks a profound spiritual and social void. Navigating this vast wilderness requires more than mere observation; it demands a radical, unflinching engagement with the forces that shape modern life.
Essays and soliloquies
Miguel de Unamuno
A man of intense, restless spirit, the author confronts the silence of the universe, urging his readers to abandon comfortable logic in favor of a passionate, quixotic struggle for individual meaning.
Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan: First Series
Lafcadio Hearn
This immersive travelogue invites readers into the fading traditional life of nineteenth-century Japan, capturing the intersection of ancient myth, Buddhist spirituality, and the daily rhythms of a culture on the brink of profound modernization.
The Perfect Wagnerite: A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring
Bernard Shaw
The opera house is not a place for idle entertainment, but a mirror reflecting the political and social struggles of the modern world. Through the lens of a revolutionary, the epic cycle of the Niblungs becomes a stark, essential drama of power, greed, and the inevitable decay of outmoded authority.
Modern Essays
Unknown
The essayist acts as both a scout and a companion, navigating the vast, often overlooked territories of literature and human experience to find the quiet truths hidden in plain sight.
The Forerunners
Romain Rolland
These essays serve as a desperate, defiant archive of independent thought during the First World War. They preserve the voices of the few who refused to succumb to the prevailing winds of nationalistic hatred.
Mabini's Decalogue for Filipinos
Apolinario Mabini
To love one's country is to embrace a divine, intellectual, and moral imperative. This foundational text serves as a guiding star for those who seek to balance individual virtue with the collective destiny of a struggling nation.
National Epics
Kate Milner Rabb
This volume serves as a curated gateway to the world’s most enduring narrative poems, distilling monumental works into accessible summaries and essential scenes for the reader who lacks the time to master every original text.
The writing of fiction
Edith Wharton
The art of storytelling is not a haphazard act of inspiration, but a disciplined craft requiring both technical precision and a profound, detached understanding of the human condition.
Rousseau and Romanticism
Irving Babbitt
By turning inward to a private world of feeling, modern culture has unmoored itself from the steadying influence of tradition and the humanistic law of measure.
Index of the Project Gutenberg Works of Michel De Montaigne
Michel de Montaigne
The most human of companions, these reflections explore the vast, messy, and contradictory landscape of the self. They transform the act of thinking into a lifelong conversation, inviting readers to examine their own lives with the same unflinching, gentle curiosity.
Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania, to the Inhabitants of the British Colonies
John Dickinson
The path to revolution is rarely paved with sudden violence; more often, it begins with the quiet erosion of legal precedent and the slow, deliberate subversion of self-governance.
Post-Augustan Poetry From Seneca to Juvenal
Harold Edgeworth Butler
The literature of Rome’s Silver Age is a landscape of brilliant, troubled intellects straining against the shadow of their own golden past. This survey navigates the complex tension between technical mastery and the decay of genuine creative spirit in the post-Augustan world.
Modern Prose And Poetry
Unknown
This collection serves as a pedagogical window into the early twentieth-century American classroom, gathering diverse voices to cultivate literary appreciation and critical thought in young readers.
The Physiology of Marriage, Complete
Honoré de Balzac
HOOK Marriage, as framed here, is not a natural state but a battlefield of wits, where husbands must play the part of kings, diplomats, and jailers to maintain the fragile illusion of domestic harmony.
A doctor enjoys Sherlock Holmes
Edward J. (Edward Jerald) Van Liere
A practicing physician examines the Sherlock Holmes canon, mining the stories for insights into Victorian medicine, natural history, and the enduring physiological habits of the world’s most famous detective and his companion.
Adventures Among Books
Andrew Lang
These essays offer a quiet, erudite sanctuary for the reader who finds more companionship in the pages of old books than in the company of the living. A lifelong devotee of letters reflects on the literary adventures that shaped his mind, from the formative thrill of ancient classics to the ghostly allure of…
The Catholic World, Vol. 19, April 1874‐September 1874
Various
A sweeping nineteenth-century compendium gathers formal philosophy, political critique, serialized fiction, and travel sketches to defend Catholic faith against modern materialism, secular politics, and cultural drift.
Works of Martin Luther, with Introductions and Notes (Volume I)
Martin Luther
A seismic shift in Western theology begins here, capturing the raw, urgent voice of a monk challenging the foundations of his world. These foundational texts serve as the opening salvo of a revolution that redefined the spiritual life.
The Correspondence of Madame, Princess Palatine, Mother of the Regent
Orléans, Charlotte-Elisabeth, duchesse d'
This collection of letters captures the biting, observant, and resilient voice of a German princess navigating the gilded, suffocating labyrinth of the French court at the height of the Sun King’s power.
The Path of the Law
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Predicting how public force will act through the courts forms the true heart of legal work, far removed from moral dogma or purely abstract mathematical logic.
A preface to politics
Walter Lippmann
A brilliant young critic tears through the rigid mechanics of American government, arguing that no law or political machine can ever replace an understanding of human desire.
Chips from a German Workshop, Volume 4: Essays Chiefly on the Science of Language
F. Max (Friedrich Max) Müller
Language is not a static artifact but an evolving, living organism whose historical growth reveals the shared history and cognitive development of all human civilization.