Thing Finder

This is the final test of a gentleman: his respect for those who can be of no possible service to him. - William Lyon Phelps

From Thomas Ayres' A Military Miscellany . In 1831 Edgar Allan Poe was enrolled as a cadet at West Point but was expelled for disobeyin...

In tenth grade I attended a boarding school in East Anglia in the UK. An interesting and fairly distinctive experience. While administered...

From John Milton's Areopagitica. I deny not, but that it is of greatest concernment in the Church and Commonwealth, to have a vigilant ...

Solitude by Ella Wheeler Wilcox Laugh, and the world laughs with you; Weep, and you weep alone; For the sad old earth must borrow its mirt...

Quoted in Clive James' Cultural Amnesia . In a universe more and more abstract, it is up to us to make sure that the human voice does n...

This passage from David Perkins' The Eureka Effect made me think of the challenge facing parents in finding the books that they most wan...

From James C. Humes' Speak Like Churchill, Stand Like Lincoln . In August 1964, Sir Winston Churchill lay dying in London's King Ed...

I have nearly finished Richard Henry Dana's Two Years Before the Mast . An interesting story that it took a long time to getting around...

From Peter Martin's A Life of James Boswell . James Boswell has confessed to Samuel Johnson that "I don't talk much from books...