A two-thousand year old classic that continues to find new fans in the digital age, On the Shortness of Life is a Stoic Philosophy masterpiece and, perhaps, the first and greatest of self-help books. Packed with pithy timeless wisdom, Seneca’s famous collection of letters to his father-in-law Paulinus is a short but powerful work, one of Western literature’s finest and most enduring answers to the eternal question, How should I best live my life?

According to Wikipedia: "Utopia is a work of fiction and political philosophy by Thomas More published in 1516... The book, written in Latin, is a frame narrative primarily depicting a fictional island society and its religious, social and political customs... Sir Thomas More (February 7, 1478 July 6, 1535), also known as Saint Thomas More, was an English lawyer, scholar, author, and statesman. He is also recognised as a saint within the Catholic Church. During his life he gained a reputat...

"On the Shortness of Life" is a moral essay written by Seneca the Younger, a Roman Stoic philosopher, to his friend Paulinus. The philosopher brings up many Stoic principles on the nature of time, namely that men waste much of it in meaningless pursuits. According to the essay, nature gives man enough time to do what is really important and the individual must allot it properly. In general, time can be best used in the study of philosophy, according to Seneca.Lucius Annaeus Seneca,...

In 336 b.c. Philip of Macedonia was assassinated and his twenty-year-old son, Alexander, inherited his kingdom. Immediately quelling rebellion, Alexander extended his father’s empire through-out the Middle East and into parts of Asia, fulfilling the soothsayer Aristander’s prediction that the new king “should perform acts so important and glorious as would make the poets and musicians of future ages labour and sweat to describe and celebrate him.”The Life of Alexander the Gr...

While the story is thematically similar to Candide by Voltaire, also published early in 1759 – both concern young men travelling in the company of honoured teachers, encountering and examining human suffering in an attempt to determine the root of happiness – their root concerns are distinctly different. Voltaire was very directly satirising the widely read philosophical work by Gottfried Leibniz, particularly the Theodicee, in which Leibniz asserts that the world, no matter how we may per...

The City of the Sun is a philosophical work by the Italian Dominican philosopher Tommaso Campanella. It is an important early utopian work. The work was written shortly after Campanella's imprisonment for heresy and sedition.The book is presented as a dialogue between "a Grandmaster of the Knights Hospitaller and a Genoese Sea-Captain". Inspired by Plato's Republic and the description of Atlantis in Timaeus, it describes a theocratic society where goods, women and children are held...

The Epistulae morales ad Lucilium (English: Moral Epistles to Lucilius) is a collection of 124 letters which were written by Seneca the Younger at the end of his life. They are addressed to Lucilius, the then procurator of Sicily, although he is known only through Seneca's writings. In these letters, Seneca gives Lucilius tips on how to become a more devoted Stoic. Lucilius was, at that time, the Governor of Sicily, although he is known only through Seneca's writings. Selected from the Epi...

"It is not that we have a short space of time, but that we waste much of it.Life is long enough"

The Happy Life is a dialogue written by Seneca the Younger around the year 58 AD. It was intended for his older brother Gallio, to whom Seneca also dedicated his dialogue entitled De Ira ('On Anger'). It is divided into 28 chapters that present the moral thoughts of Seneca at their most mature. Seneca explains that the pursuit of happiness is the pursuit of reason – reason meant not only using logic, but also understanding the processes of nature.

In this collection we find two of Cicero's philosophical treatises, "On Friendship" and "On Old Age". In Cicero's treatise on friendship we learn of his belief that true friendship with someone is derived from complete honesty, truth and trust. Cicero placed a high value upon friendship and saw it as a relationship of mutual benefit in which friends do things for each other without expectation of repayment. In a related philosophical writing on the human condition, the treatise on old age,...