The Beacon Bookshelf

Happiness is activity of the soul in accordance with virtue; virtue is a habit formed by practice, lying in the mean between extremes; friendship of the good is life's crowning good. Aristotle's ethics — the backbone of classical and Christian moral teaching alike — gives students the very vocabulary of character every book on this list assumes.

The fragments of the great mathematician's unfinished defense of Christianity: man as 'thinking reed,' the misery and grandeur of a deposed king, diversion as the engine of modern life, the wager, and 'the heart has its reasons which reason knows not.' No book better diagnoses the restless, distracted human condition — written three centuries before the smartphone made Pascal's chapter on diversion read like prophecy.

The ghost of Denmark's king demands vengeance of his son, and Hamlet — the most searching mind in all drama — delays, probes, feigns madness, stages a play to catch the conscience of a king, and pulls the whole rotten court down with him. The play every educated person must know: conscience, action, mortality, and 'what a piece of work is a man' argued in the greatest poetry English possesses.