Literature and Life | The World of English

Literature, ideas, learning and Knowledge.

Literature and life. The art of words, writing, reading, telling stories, using imagination, fantasy and knowledge with a lot of free e-books and links to literary resources.

Real books are not the children of light and chatter, but of darkness and silence.
Marcel Proust

Others boast of the words they wrote: my pride lies in what I read.
Jorge Luis Borges

Reading good books could help soothe human stupidity, the problem is that stupidity doesn’t like to read.
Carl William Brown

There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.
Joseph Brodsky

We live for books. A sweet mission in this world dominated by disorder and decay.
Umberto Eco

Literature is a defence against the insults of life.
Cesare Pavese

Children must be taught how to think, not what to think.
Margaret Mead

The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractacus Logico-Philosophicus

The rime of the ancient mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge; Gulliver’s travels by Jonathan Swift and Hamlet by Shakespeare are the literary texts I prefer the most.
Carl William Brown

Books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them… I know they are as lively and as vigorously productive as those fabulous dragon’s teeth and being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men.
John Milton

Many writers, even those praised, are such only because they wrote, then it does not mean they have taught us so much.
Carl William Brown

DA Datta, DA Dayadhvam, DA Damyata, shantih, shantih, shantih! (Give, sympathize, control, peace, peace, peace).
T.S. Eliot from The Waste Land

Books for general reading always smell badly; the odor of common people hangs about them.
Friedrich Nietzsche

Stories entertain and teach; they help us to enjoy life and also to endure it. After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.
Philip Pullman

Stories are the most important thing in the world. Without stories, we wouldn’t be human beings at all.
Philip Pullman

Don’t just say that you have read books. Show that through them you have learned to think better.
Epictetus

WORLD BOOKS IN THE NET is a free web resource which contains links to free downloadable e-books, publishers, authors, technical papers, documents, as well as user contributed content, articles, reviews and comments. A literary social sharing service to students, teachers, researchers and e-book lovers.

Anna’s Archive (better to use a VPN to surf this website, with Opera browser you get it for free) is a free non-profit online shadow library metasearch engine providing access to a variety of book resources (also via IPFS), created by a team of anonymous archivists (referred to as Anna and/or the Pirate Library Mirror (PiLiMi) team), and launched in direct response to law enforcement efforts, formally assisted by The Publishers Association and the Authors Guild, to close down the Z-Library (Free access to knowledge and culture) website in November 2022.

As such, the Anna’s Archive team claims to provide metadata access to Open Library materials, to be a backup of the Library Genesis and Z-Library shadow libraries, presents ISBN information, has no copyrighted materials on its website, and only indexes metadata that is already publicly available. Anna’s Archive notes that their website, a non-profit project, accepts donations to cover costs (hosting, domain names, development and related).

Nonetheless, besides the recently launched Anna’s Archive website, many other alternative workarounds to the recent attempts to take down the Z-Library (better to use a VPN to surf this website, with Opera browser you get it for free) platform have been reported. Another useful website for books is certanly PDF Drive where you can search and download PDF files for free.

https://www.openculture.com/ Open Culture is a prominent educational and cultural website founded in 2006 that curates high-quality, free resources for lifelong learners worldwide. It centralizes scattered web content, offering access to more than 1,700 free online courses from Universities, movies, audiobooks, ebooks, and language lessons. It is widely considered a valuable, free repository for educational media. Take online courses from the world’s top universities for free.

https://www.jstor.org/ JSTOR and Artstor offer millions of articles, books, images, and media that are open access or free to everyone. Learn how to search, access, and use these resources from libraries, publishers, and partners worldwide. Harness the power of visual materials – explore more than 3 million images now on JSTOR. Search for images Enhance your scholarly research with underground newspapers, magazines, and journals. Browse Independent Voices Explore collections in the arts, sciences, and literature from the world’s leading museums, archives, and scholars. … Log in to JSTOR. Log in with Google Log in with Microsoft Find my institution . or. Use your JSTOR or Artstor username and password. Username or email address required.

Another very useful website for discovering and sharing presentations, books and infographics on any kind is certainly Slideshare, a Scribd company, with the world’s largest professional content sharing community.

William Shakespeare Aphoristic dictionary

https://www.base-search.net/ BASE is one of the world’s most voluminous search engines especially for academic web resources. The index contains more than 400 million records from more than 12,000 content providers. You can access the full texts of about 60% of the indexed records for free (Open Access). BASE is operated by Bielefeld University Library. We are indexing the metadata of all kinds of academically relevant resources – journals, institutional repositories, digital collections etc. – which provide an OAI interface and use OAI-PMH for providing their contents (see our Golden Rules for Repository Managers). The index is continuously enhanced by integrating further sources / content provider (Become a content provider). We are working on several new features like a claiming service for authors within the ORCID DE project.

https://bookboon.com/ Bookboon.com is a major digital publisher specializing in free, ad-supported textbooks for students and bite-sized, premium e-books/audiobooks for professional development. Offering over 1,000+ titles in engineering, IT, and business, it provides PDF formats aimed at making learning accessible and efficient.Key Aspects of Bookboon:Business Model: Initially focused on free textbooks financed by in-book employer branding/advertisements.Content Types: Offers textbooks for students, as well as e-books, audiobooks, and “bite-sized” learning content focused on soft skills and productivity for employees.Target Audience: Students looking for free academic resources (engineering, science, IT, economics) and professionals seeking quick, practical learning.Access: Many textbooks are available for free download (sometimes requiring registration), while corporate content is usually offered through paid subscriptions.Focus on ‘Bite-Sized’: The platform has evolved to offer short, focused learning content designed for busy schedules.The company, founded in Denmark (formerly Ventus) and currently headquartered in London, is recognized as a significant player in the digital education and e-book space.

https://manybooks.net/ Welcome to your friendly neighborhood library. We have more than 50,000 free ebooks waiting to be discovered. ManyBooks was established in 2004 with the vision to provide an extensive library of books in digital format for free on the Internet. Many of the early eBooks are from the Project Gutenberg archives, which means you will be able to find a lot of classics on the site.

https://www.smashwords.com/ Smashwords is a major self-publishing platform and ebook distributor acquired by Draft2Digital (D2D) in 2022, specializing in getting indie authors onto various retail and library platforms worldwide. Founded in 2008, it offers free formatting tools, high royalty rates (up to 75%+), and wide distribution to retailers like Kobo and Barnes & Noble.

https://welib-public.org/ Welib.org is a platform offering free access to millions of books, academic papers, and magazines. While marketed as a “treasure trove” for learners, it is flagged by users as potentially unsafe or suspicious. It appears to have taken over traffic from PDFdrive.com, leading to user concerns regarding its legitimacy and potential redirection tactics.

https://oceanofpdf.com OceanofPDF.com is a notorious digital ebook piracy site that provides free downloads of copyrighted materials, often in violation of intellectual property laws. While popular for its vast, easily browsable library, it is highly controversial, frequently targeted by Authors Guild takedown notices, and poses risks of malware through deceptive ads.

https://www.obooko.com Obooko is a legal, free ebook download and reader platform founded in 2010 that provides PDF and ePub books to readers globally. In a world of endless scrolling, shrinking attention spans, and algorithms designed to keep us hooked on nothing, we’re losing something vital. Instantly download free eBooks, novels and textbooks online (pdf and epub). Fiction and non-fiction, legally licensed for you to read & keep forever. The newsletter is free to customers, but authors and publishers pay to be featured in the newsletter. Authors and publishers use BookBub to gain exposure with the intention to increase future sales.

https://centslessbooks.com CentslessBooks.com is a, popular, curated website that aggregates free Kindle books across various genres like romance, mystery, and sci-fi. It updates frequently, helping readers find temporary and permanent freebies on Amazon, while also providing a “Book Club” for curated deals and offering marketing services for authors.Key features of Centsless Books include:Free Kindle Focus: Primarily showcases books available for free on Amazon Kindle, ranging from romance and mystery to professional, technical, and educational, literature.Hourly Updates: The site frequently updates to reflect the current top free ebooks available, ensuring users don’t miss deals.Centsless Book Club: A subscription service that sends free ebooks and exclusive content directly to subscribers’ inboxes every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Author Promotions: Allows authors and publishers to promote their books to a large reader base.

Might I give counsel to any young man, I would say to him, try to frequent the company of your betters. In books and in life, that is the most wholesome society; learn to admire rightly; the great pleasure of life is that. Note what great men admired; they admired great things; narrow spirits admire basely and worship meanly.
W. M. Thackeray

There can be no transforming of darkness into light and of apathy into movement without emotion.
Carl Jung

A philosopher or a man of letters can write a book, but only readers can make him speak and by giving him a voice, make people listen to him.
Carl William Brown

What the dead had no speech for, when living, They can tell you, being dead: the communication Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.
T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets

Without literature, life is hell.
Charles Bukowski

Books weigh a lot: and yet, those who feed on them and put them in their bodies, live among the clouds.
Luigi Pirandello

The purpose of literature is to turn blood into ink.
T. S. Eliot

The palest ink is better than the most retentive memory.
Chinese proverb

What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.
T. S. Eliot

We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.
T. S. Eliot

The greatness of literature cannot be determined solely by literary standards though we must remember that whether it is literature or not can be determined only by literary standards.
T. S. Eliot

The historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of literature from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order.
T. S. Eliot

Literature is news that stays news.
Ezra Pound

Our high respect for a well read person is praise enough for literature.
T. S. Eliot

It is just the literature that we read for ‘amusement’ or ‘purely for pleasure’ that may have the greatest, least suspected, earliest influence on us.
T.S. Eliot

The more we elaborate our means of communication, the less we communicate.
J. B. Priestley

Religion is only literature, but luckily literature is more than that!
Carl William Brown

The difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read.
Oscar Wilde

Imaginative literature in the service of rebellion, or satanism, quickly sinks into exhibitionism or obscurity. Imaginative literature as the expression of a deeply apprehended truth, poetry which interprets to a man the myth of his own age, can in the hands of Dante, of Shakespeare, of Cervantes, of Camoes and of Goethe, help to raise the level of a whole civilization.
J. M. Cohen

Literature that is not the breath of contemporary society, that dares not transmit the pains and fears of that society, that does not warn in time against threatening moral and social dangers, such literature does not deserve the name of literature; it is only a façade. Such literature loses the confidence of its own people, and its published works are used as wastepaper instead of being read.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Since “Profonda Magia E’ Sempre Trar Il Contrario Dopo Aver Trovato Il Punto De’ L’unione” as Giordano Bruno said, I don’t agree with Eliot when he affirms that the purpose of literature is to turn blood into ink, but I would rather say that the real, magick sense and goal of literature is the opposite, that is to turn ink into blood!
Carl William Brown

Dictionary of literary terms (It’s free)

Literature is a vague term which usually denotes works which belong to the major genres: epic, drama, lyric, ode, novel, short story, etc. In any case its main feature is that it is referred to the practice and profession of writing and reading. It comes from human interest in telling a story, in arranging words in artistic forms, in describing in words some aspects of human experiences.

So we can read Literature for Knowledge, for Pleasure, for Relaxation or as a therapy to the nuisances of life! Literature, painting, sculpture, theater, film – all these forms are part of people’s efforts to transcend reality. It might be for the purpose of moralizing, of presenting a “higher truth,” or simply to entertain, to replace the theater of the real with pleasant fantasy.
Carl William Brown

Most definitions of literature have been criterial definitions, definitions based on a list of criteria which all literary works must meet. However, more current theories of meaning take the view that definitions are based on prototypes: there is broad agreement about good examples that meet all of the prototypical characteristics, and other examples are related to the prototypes by family resemblance. For literary works, prototypical characteristics include careful use of language, being written in a literary genre (poetry, prose fiction, or drama), being read aesthetically, and containing many weak implicatures.
Jim Meyer

In an essay titled The Poetry of Pope (published in the North British Review, Aug. 1848), Thomas de Quincey made an interesting distinction between the literature of knowledge and the literature of power: There is, first, the literature of knowledge; and, secondly, the literature of power. The function of the first is to teach; the function of the second is to move.

The first is a rudder, the second an oar or a sail. The first speaks to the mere discursive understanding; the second speaks ultimately, it may happen, to the higher understanding or reason, but always through affections of pleasure and sympathy. De Quincey elaborates the idea at some length. What he is getting at is that an encyclopaedia instructs and is therefore didactic; a great play, on the other hand, moves by appealing to the emotions and thereby also instructs but in a totally different way.

A hallmark feature of human intelligence is its adaptability, the ability to invent and rearrange conceptions of the world to suit changing goals and environments. One consequence of this flexibility is the great diversity of languages that have emerged around the globe.

Each provides its own cognitive toolkit and encapsulates the knowledge and worldview developed over thousands of years within a culture. Each contains a way of perceiving, categorizing and making meaning in the world, an invaluable guidebook developed and honed by our ancestors.
Lera Boroditsky, “How Language Shapes Thought,” Scientific American, Feb. 2011

The most noble and profitable invention of all other, was that of speech, consisting of names or apellations, and their connections; whereby men register their thoughts; recall them when they are past; and also declare them one to another for mutual utility and conversation; without which, there had been amongst men, neither commonwealth, nor society, nor contract, nor peace, no more than amongst lions, bears, and wolves.
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan

The Nature of Literature
The first problem to confront us is, obviously, the subject matter of literary scholarship. What is literature? What is not literature? What is the nature of literature? Simple as such questions sound, they are rarely answered clearly. One way is to define “literature” as everything in print. We then shall be able to study the “medical profession in the fourteenth century” or “planetary motion in the early Middle Ages” or “Witchcraft in Old and New England.”

As Edwin Greenlaw has argued, “Nothing related to the history of civilization is beyond our province” ; we are “not limited to belles lettres or even to printed or manuscript records in our effort to understand a period or civilization,” and we “must see our work in the light of its possible contribution to the history of culture.”
Rene Wellek and Austin Warren

https://folgerpedia.folger.edu/ Folgerpedia was Founded on 9 July 2014, and it is the Folger Shakespeare Library’s collaboratively-edited, search-based encyclopedia of all things “Folger.” Content of the articles has been contributed by various departments within the institution, as well as Folger readers and other scholars. The articles address each topic as it relates to the Folger and the Folger collection. There is a variety of article types that can be found on Folgerpedia, including: lists; how tos; and encyclopedic entries concerning items in the collection, Shakespeare’s works and characters, and his works in performance. There is also an enormous curated list of digital resources about cultural matters, arranged by type and then alphabetically.