Epitome

The Dhammapada, "The Path of Virtue," Chapter 1: "The Twin Verses." The Dhammapada contains the core received teachings of Siddhartha Gautama, known as "The Buddha."

The most popular work of Baltasar Gracián,  a Spanish Jesuit and writer who lived from 1601 to 1658,  is the Oráculo Manual y Arte de Prudencia,  which translates literally as Oracle Handbook and Art of Prudence ,  a collection of 300 sayings with commentary,  written in 1647.  The first four passages of this classic work  are adapted from the 1892 translation by Joseph Jacobs,  which he titles The Art of Worldly Wisdom .

The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio, a Florentine writer who lived from 1313 to 1375, is a story of seven young women and three young men in 14 th century Italy who take shelter in a secluded villa outside Florence from the epidemic known as the Black Death ravaging their city. While thus sheltered for ten days, they take turns telling stories. This is one of them.

What if the rational and passionate dimensions of our mind are connected in some way, where one may even cause the other? In this excerpt from a brief, less celebrated story named “The Imp of the Perverse,”this master of the macabre puts forth his idea that our passion to do what we know to be wrong is driven precisely by our rational knowledge of what is right.

A consideration of the difference between these two human drives.

An epistolary exchange between Horace Greeley, founder and editor of The New York Tribune and Abraham Lincoln. Greeley, a devout abolitionist, reprimands Lincoln for being too lenient on slave owners. Lincoln responds by clarifying his aims.

An allegorical short-short story (or classic flash fiction) by Lord Dunsany.

Francois VI, duke de la Rochefoucauld, published "Reflections, or Sentences and Moral Maxims" in 1665. The original work contains only 314 short sentences; the last edition he published contains 541. This episode's selection features a more extended passage.