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Stendhal,  (1783 – 1842), Marie-Henri Beyle known by his nom de plume Stendhal, was a 19th-century French writer. He is highly regarded for the acute analysis of his characters' psychology and considered one of the early and foremost practitioners of realism. Among his novels novels are Le Rouge et le Noir (The Red and the Black, 1830) and La Chartreuse de Parme (The Charterhouse of Parma, 1839) A self-proclaimed egotist, he coined the same characteristic in his characters' "Beylism". 

Jorge Luis Borges'  (August 24, 1899–June 14, 1986) in “Borges and I” — his classic parable of selfhood, exploring the divide between private person and public persona that each of us must live with and live into. It appears in Labyrinths (public library) — a collection of Borges’s stories, essays, parables, and other writings, originally published in 1962  More at The Marginalian ➜ 

"A roadmap to the fulfilled belonging on the other side of “the great aloneness which knows not what is far and what is near, nor what is small nor great." Read more

 "Friendship is the sunshine of life — the quiet radiance that makes our lives not only livable but worth living. (This is why we must use the utmost care in how we wield the word friend".... Read more at the Marginalian

"In The Story of Ferdinand (public library), a gentle-souled young misfit bull sits out the perpetual head-butting by which his peers hone their bull-skills, choosing instead to smell the flowers under his favorite cork tree in solitude. His mother, at first worried about his bullness, recognizes her son’s difference and trusts that he would find his way" And so he does..... Read more

"A symbolic moment of peace, grace, and humility amidst one of humanity’s most violent and disgraceful events".
"In December of 1914, a series of grassroots, unofficial ceasefires took hold of the Western Front in the heat of WWI. On Christmas, soldiers from an estimated 100,000 British and German troops began to exchange seasonal greetings and sing songs across the trenches",........ Continue Reading

"A pleasingly disorienting foray into the fundamental perplexity of life".

From Rumi to Blake to Nick Cave, by way of trees, hummingbirds, grief, and music. In this sixteenth year of The Marginalian, which draws primarily on the timeless wonders and wisdoms of the past, here are sixteen books of the immediate present that left on me a mark on par with those immortals — Read more

“The world where the owl is endlessly hungry and endlessly on the hunt is the world in which I live too. There is only one world.” Read more

Image credit: The royal natural history (1893) Authors: Lydekker, Richard,- Smithsonian Libraries

“Left to ourselves, mechanistic and autonomic, we hanker for friends… Maybe altruism is our most primitive attribute, out of reach, beyond our control.”

Neil Postman (1931 –  2003) was an American author, educator, media theorist and cultural critic.  He is best known for his books regarding technology and education, including Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985), Conscientious Objections (1988), Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (1992), The Disappearance of Childhood (1982) and The End of Education: Redefining the Value of School (1995). He also wrote about postmodernism, semantics, linguistics, and technopolies.

Sources: Wikipedia, NeilPostman.org

Freya Madeline Stark DBE (1893 – 1993), was a British-Italian explorer and travel writer. For her ninth birthday, Stark received a copy of One Thousand and One Nights and became fascinated with the Orient. She studied Arabic and later, Persian at Bedford College, London and the School of Oriental and African Studies. She wrote more than two dozen books on her travels in the Middle East and Afghanistan as well as several autobiographical works and essays. She was one of the first non-Arabs known to travel through the southern Arabian Desert in modern times.  ~ Quote Source: The Journey's Echo by Freya Stark