/lit/ - Literature

After going years without reading, I want to start a journey to have a minimally holistic knowledge of Humanities (or Philosophy, if you prefer).
If you could choose, from the early days of writing to the 21st century, which books are absolutely essential to understand Western and Eastern thought in it's differents points of view?

Charts are welcome.

>>20009638
Libertarians are the biggest and most obnoxious moralfags of all time. They are worse than Christans, leftists, and social conservatives combined. Also Ayn Rand is a terrible writer.

>>19944535
I start and end with the Greeks.

>>19830597
>Only through anachronistic fetishism does the novel have a chance to experience a rebirth in relevance. Without a current of rebellion or a veneer of clashing styles there is nothing to compete against race fetishism, altruism grifting (yang/political figures in general), and wish fulfillment power fantasies ad infinitum.

>For to fear death, men, is in fact nothing other than to seem to be wise, but not to be so. For it is to seem to know what one does not know: no one knows whether death does not even happen to be the greatest of all goods for the human being; but people fear it as though they knew well that it is the greatest of evils. And how is this not that reproachable ignorance of supposing that one knows what one does not know? But I, men, am perhaps distinguished from the many human beings also here in this, and if I were to say that I am wiser than anyone in anything, it would be in this: that since I do not know sufficiently about the things in Hades,so also I suppose that I do not know. But I do know that it is bad and shameful to do injustice and to disobey one’s better, whether god or human being. So compared to the bad things which I know are bad, I will never fear or flee the things about which I do not know whether they even happen to be good.

What's there to hate though? He's just a boomer Reaganite/Thatcherite, everyone over the age of 45 more or less is that.

>For to fear death, men, is in fact nothing other than to seem to be wise, but not to be so. For it is to seem to know what one does not know: no one knows whether death does not even happen to be the greatest of all goods for the human being; but people fear it as though they knew well that it is the greatest of evils. And how is this not that reproachable ignorance of supposing that one knows what one does not know? But I, men, am perhaps distinguished from the many human beings also here in this, and if I were to say that I am wiser than anyone in anything, it would be in this: that since I do not know sufficiently about the things in Hades,so also I suppose that I do not know. But I do know that it is bad and shameful to do injustice and to disobey one’s better, whether god or human being. So compared to the bad things which I know are bad, I will never fear or flee the things about which I do not know whether they even happen to be good.

no matter how much philosophy i read, it all goes over my head and i can't understand nor apply it. how can i start actually processing what i read? am i just doomed to be small minded forever?

>>19443318
ETERNAL REMINDER
>For to fear death, men, is in fact nothing other than to seem to be wise, but not to be so. For it is to seem to know what one does not know: no one knows whether death does not even happen to be the greatest of all goods for the human being; but people fear it as though they knew well that it is the greatest of evils. And how is this not that reproachable ignorance of supposing that one knows what one does not know? But I, men, am perhaps distinguished from the many human beings also here in this, and if I were to say that I am wiser than anyone in anything, it would be in this: that since I do not know sufficiently about the things in Hades,so also I suppose that I do not know. But I do know that it is bad and shameful to do injustice and to disobey one’s better, whether god or human being. So compared to the bad things which I know are bad, I will never fear or flee the things about which I do not know whether they even happen to be good.

>For to fear death, men, is in fact nothing other than to seem to be wise, but not to be so. For it is to seem to know what one does not know: no one knows whether death does not even happen to be the greatest of all goods for the human being; but people fear it as though they knew well that it is the greatest of evils. And how is this not that reproachable ignorance of supposing that one knows what one does not know? But I, men, am perhaps distinguished from the many human beings also here in this, and if I were to say that I am wiser than anyone in anything, it would be in this: that since I do not know sufficiently about the things in Hades,so also I suppose that I do not know. But I do know that it is bad and shameful to do injustice and to disobey one’s better, whether god or human being. So compared to the bad things which I know are bad, I will never fear or flee the things about which I do not know whether they even happen to be good.

>>19402869
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_authors_banned_in_Nazi_Germany

>Hilaire Belloc, Walter Benjamin, Edmund Burke, Flannery O’Connor, GK Chesterton, Alfred Döblin, Dorothy Day, John Dos Passos, Albert Einstein, Erasmus, F. Scott Fitzgerald, André Gide, Heinrich Heine, Ernest Hemingway, Herman Hesse, David Hume, Aldous Huxley, Thomas Jefferson, Erich Kästner, Franz Kafka, C.S. Lewis, Vladimir Lenin, Jack London, Thomas Mann, Robert Musil, John Henry Newman, George Orwell, Marcel Proust, Thomas Paine, Friedrich Reck, Erich Maria Remarque, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Joseph Roth, Fulton Sheen, Adam Smith, J.R.R. Tolkien, Mark Twain, Voltaire, H.G. Wells, Oscar Wilde, Simone Weil and Stefan Zweig are “pornographic literature”

Also, would you burn classic Western works like the plays of Aristophanes, the poems of Catullus or Petronius’ Satyricon in that case? Would you burn Ovid’s Ars amatoria, or Plutarch’s Amatorius? Would you burn Plato’s Symposium?

>>19395803
Don’t Google Achilles and Patroclus on Google images

>For to fear death, men, is in fact nothing other than to seem to be wise, but not to be so. For it is to seem to know what one does not know: no one knows whether death does not even happen to be the greatest of all goods for the human being; but people fear it as though they knew well that it is the greatest of evils. And how is this not that reproachable ignorance of supposing that one knows what one does not know? But I, men, am perhaps distinguished from the many human beings also here in this, and if I were to say that I am wiser than anyone in anything, it would be in this: that since I do not know sufficiently about the things in Hades,so also I suppose that I do not know. But I do know that it is bad and shameful to do injustice and to disobey one’s better, whether god or human being. So compared to the bad things which I know are bad, I will never fear or flee the things about which I do not know whether they even happen to be good.

>Plato's banquet is almost entirely concerned with love, not merely with men in love with women, or women with men, lusts subject to the laws of nature, but of men with males differing from them only in respect of age...
Philo

oh no no no Plato bros...

>For to fear death, men, is in fact nothing other than to seem to be wise, but not to be so. For it is to seem to know what one does not know: no one knows whether death does not even happen to be the greatest of all goods for the human being; but people fear it as though they knew well that it is the greatest of evils. And how is this not that reproachable ignorance of supposing that one knows what one does not know? But I, men, am perhaps distinguished from the many human beings also here in this, and if I were to say that I am wiser than anyone in anything, it would be in this: that since I do not know sufficiently about the things in Hades,so also I suppose that I do not know. But I do know that it is bad and shameful to do injustice and to disobey one’s better, whether god or human being. So compared to the bad things which I know are bad, I will never fear or flee the things about which I do not know whether they even happen to be good.

>For to fear death, men, is in fact nothing other than to seem to be wise, but not to be so. For it is to seem to know what one does not know: no one knows whether death does not even happen to be the greatest of all goods for the human being; but people fear it as though they knew well that it is the greatest of evils. And how is this not that reproachable ignorance of supposing that one knows what one does not know? But I, men, am perhaps distinguished from the many human beings also here in this, and if I were to say that I am wiser than anyone in anything, it would be in this: that since I do not know sufficiently about the things in Hades,so also I suppose that I do not know. But I do know that it is bad and shameful to do injustice and to disobey one’s better, whether god or human being. So compared to the bad things which I know are bad, I will never fear or flee the things about which I do not know whether they even happen to be good.

>>19244641
>Young men should look for older men to talk to about these topics
based pederast

>For to fear death, men, is in fact nothing other than to seem to be wise, but not to be so. For it is to seem to know what one does not know: no one knows whether death does not even happen to be the greatest of all goods for the human being; but people fear it as though they knew well that it is the greatest of evils. And how is this not that reproachable ignorance b of supposing that one knows what one does not know? But I, men, am perhaps distinguished from the many human beings also here in this, and if I were to say that I am wiser than anyone in anything, it would be in this: that since I do not know sufficiently about the things in Hades,so also I suppose that I do not know. But I do know that it is bad and shameful to do injustice and to disobey one’s better, whether god or human being. So compared to the bad things which I know are bad, I will never fear or flee the things about which I do not know whether they even happen to be good.

>For to fear death, men, is in fact nothing other than to seem to be wise, but not to be so. For it is to seem to know what one does not know: no one knows whether death does not even happen to be the greatest of all goods for the human being; but people fear it as though they knew well that it is the greatest of evils. And how is this not that reproachable ignorance b of supposing that one knows what one does not know? But I, men, am perhaps distinguished from the many human beings also here in this, and if I were to say that I am wiser than anyone in anything, it would be in this: that since I do not know sufficiently about the things in Hades,so also I suppose that I do not know. But I do know that it is bad and shameful to do injustice and to disobey one’s better, whether god or human being. So compared to the bad things which I know are bad, I will never fear or flee the things about which I do not know whether they even happen to be good.

Paganbros...I thought only Christians did stuff like this...
>The Platonic Academy was destroyed by the Roman dictator Sulla in 86 BC.[1]

>In 86 BC, Lucius Cornelius Sulla laid siege to Athens and conquered the city, causing much destruction. It was during the siege that he laid waste to the Academy, as Plutarch relates: "He laid hands upon the sacred groves and ravaged the Academy, which was the most wooded of the city's suburbs, as well as the Lyceum."[33]

>The destruction of the Academy seems to have been so severe as to make the reconstruction and re-opening of the Academy impossible.[34]
----
>the fire started by Caesar destroyed 40,000 scrolls from the Library of Alexandria.[57]
----
>In 322 BC, Demophilus and Eurymedon the Hierophant reportedly denounced Aristotle for impiety,[20] prompting him to flee to his mother's family estate in Chalcis, on Euboea, at which occasion he was said to have stated: "I will not allow the Athenians to sin twice against philosophy"[21][22][23] – a reference to Athens's trial and execution of Socrates.

>In 399 BC, Socrates went on trial[85] and was subsequently found guilty of both corrupting the minds of the youth of Athens and of impiety (asebeia,[86] "not believing in the gods of the state"),[87] and as a punishment sentenced to death, caused by the drinking of a mixture containing poison hemlock.[88][89][90][91]

>be me
>decide to become an Epicurean
>remind yourself that you don't have any friends
>guess I will have to stick with stoics
>profit? none

>>19125228
Books don't nurture the soul, life nurtures the soul
>To get up in the morning, in the fullness of youth, and open a book--now that's what I call vicious!'

My favourite passage:
Iliad, book VI, verse 128
"What, or from whence I am, or who my sire,"
Replied the chief, "can Tydeus' son inquire?
Like leaves on trees the race of man is found,
Now green in youth, now withering on the ground:
Another race the following spring supplies,
They fall successive, and successive rise;
So generations in their course decay,
So flourish these, when those are past away.

Anyone here who succeeded in reading The Illiad on dactylic hexameter? 1. How tf am I supposed to do that. 2. Did you manage to do it all in your head or did you read it out loud?