Book Excerpts
Selected passages from books connected with this theme.
Zorba the Greek
Kazantzakis Nikos · 1953
(the first chapter)
Originally published: New York: Simon and Schuster, 1953. Translated by Carl Wildman.
CHAPTER 1
I FIRST MET HIM in Piraeus. I wanted to take the boat for Crete and had gone down to the port. It …
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Nietzsche Friedrich · 1883
selected excerpts
“What do you think, you higher men? Am I a prophet? A dreamer? A drunkard? An interpreter of dreams? A midnight bell? A drop of dew? A fragrance and breath of eternity?
Do you not hear it? Do you …
The Old Man and the Sea
Hemingway · 1952
(The first lines
and selected excerpts)
He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish. In the first forty days a boy had been with him. B …
Existentialism Is a Humanism
Sartre · 1946
*Excerpt*
In the eighteenth century, with the atheism of the philosophers, the notion of God disappeared, but not the idea that essence precedes existence. We find this idea almost everywhere: in Diderot, in Voltaire, …
Double Ballad of Life and Death
Henley William
The fools shall mourn, the fools shall drink,
The cynics sneer, the prophets rage,
The moralists rebuke and teach,
The preachers prate, the faint hearts shrink.
Let them cry, threaten, mourn and die!
Till the touc …