Showing results by narrator "Denis Daly" in All Categories

While he is most famous for his didactic fable, The Prophet, the works of Kahlil Gibran (1883-1931) address a wide range of philosophical and social issues. The overriding theme of his narratives is not the religious universalism that he is supposed to represent, but rather the inevitable conflict between human aspirations and the remorseless machinations of fate.

In recent times the philosophy and practices promoted by the New Thought movement have attracted much attention through the burgeoning of the self-help industry and films such as "The Secret." Among New Thought authors, William Walker Atkinson was not only one of the most eminent, but also one of the most prolific. One of his most notable works is the mental training manual, Your Mind and How to Use It, first published in 1911. A new recording of a self-help classic, narrated by Denis Daly.

First published in 1847, Jane Eyre was the last and most popular of the novels composed by the Brontë sisters. The narrative bristles with energy and passionate conviction, and is one of the first novels written from the perspective of a child.

This self-help treatise by prominent New Thought author Christian D. Larson explores the accumulation and preservation of personal power, an essential ingredient in success. Larson defines this management of power as poise, an attitude that prevents the unnecessary loss of vital force. The title page bears the following epigraph: "A genius is slumbering in the subconscious of every mind. This genius can be awakened."

Troward delivered these lectures at the Doré Gallery, Bond Street, London, in 1909. They were published in book form in the same year. Troward's basic thesis is that while the laws of the universe can never be broken, they can be made to work under special conditions, which will produce unexpected and remarkable results. The achievement of these results require the activation of what Troward terms the "personal factor", that, namely, of an intelligence which sees beyond the present limited manifestation of the law and thus enables the exploration of its infinite possibilities.

Although he was well known as an authority on spiritual traditions, Paul Carus was unusual in that he refused to align himself with any particular form of organized religion. In any case, his universalist view of God would probably have put him outside the allowable boundaries of Christian belief. Carus was particularly active in raising awareness of Eastern spiritual traditions in the West.

The novel opens with Mr. and Mrs. Parker’s visit to Sanditon, a village on the coast of Sussex. Sanditon is being developed into a bathing-place under the patronage of the two principal proprietors of the parish, Mr. Parker and Lady Denham. Mr. Parker suffers an injury and receives assistance from a local farmer, Mr. Heywood. The latter’s daughter, Charlotte, is of marriageable age and has three eligible suitors: Lady Denham’s foppish son, Sir Edward; Mr. Parker’s devil-may care brother, Sydney; and Arthur, who is an unemployed hypochondriac.

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky is best known as the cofounder of theosophy, which is essentially a selective conflation of Hindu and Buddhist ideas combined with Blavatsky's idiosyncratic system of cosmology. The Voice of the Silence, first published in 1889, is described by the author as "chosen fragments from the Book of the Golden Precepts, for the daily use of disciples".

Thomas Troward was a divisional Judge in British-administered India, who had a particular interest in the study of comparative religion. The major influence on his thinking, as well as on his writing, was the Bible, although he also considered the elements of ancient Mesopotamian religions, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism in his deliberations. After his retirement from the judiciary in 1896, Troward applied himself to the study of cause and effect in the spiritual realms using the principles of judicial investigation.

In Oedipus at Colonus, the banished king, after years of wandering, accompanied by his faithful daughter Antigone, finds himself in Athens. Receiving a warm if guarded welcome from Theseus, King of Athens, he prepares to settle himself to spend his last days in peace. However, unwelcome visitors from his tortured past continue to haunt him until the very end.

Queen Marguerite de Navarre was one of the most powerful women of her age. Her masterpiece, The Heptameron, is a collection of some 72 stories told by five gentlemen and five ladies who find themselves stranded in an abbey. Proposed as an edifying way of passing the time while a bridge is being repaired, the tale-telling - as well as the conversations that follow each story - quickly becomes a battle of wits between the sexes, with tales concerning illicit lovers, romantic conquests, lecherous monks, manly honor, and women's virtue.

This collection of miscellaneous essays was published posthumously in 1921. In the first and largest section, The Hidden Power, the author identifies Spirit as the "innermost within" of all things and the unseen essence of all phenomena. He develops this proposition to claim that Spiritual Science has fixed laws just as does Physical Science, and that an understanding of the laws could enable man to develop powers of which he is currently unaware. The other essays cover a range of topics relating to metaphysics, the Bible and other arcana of religion.

The Romantic Epistle was published in 1717 and aroused considerable interest because of its mildly suggestive content. It portrays an incident in which Héloïse d'Argenteuil, now immured in a convent chances on a letter from her former lover and later, husband, the brilliant philosopher Peter Abelard.

In this collection, the authors were striving for a natural and unaffected style of verse that sought to avoid the elaborate structures and artifice that they considered had characterized much of the poetry of the 18th century. Of the 23 poems, only four are by Coleridge, including "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner", which is the most famous poem in the collection. The most notable contribution by Wordsworth is the concluding poem, "Tintern Abbey".

First published in 1872, The Martyrdom of Man has been described as the first synoptic history of mankind. It was one of the first surveys of history based on the then-controversial principle of organic evolution. The book received a very mixed reception: Cecil Rhodes lauded the work, stating that it had "made him the man he was", while William Ewart Gladstone stated that it was so dangerous that it should be banned.

Thomas Troward (1847 - 1916) was a divisional Judge in the British administration of India. In his later years, he developed a distinctive discipline of personal development which he called Mental Science. He had a particular reverence for Jesus. In the introduction, the author asserts that "we possess latent powers which a better knowledge of the truth regarding ourselves will enable us to develop, and that the purpose of the Bible is to lead us into this knowledge in a perfectly natural manner while guarding us against the dangers arising from misuse of it."

A Doll's House, published in 1879, was the earliest of Ibsen's "social dramas", and the first of his works to attract attention outside of Scandinavia. The central theme of the play is a woman's right to individual self-development, and represents, as humourist Stephen Leacock observed of many Ibsen plays, "a profound problem stated but not solved".

Alexander Pope was celebrated for his command of classical Greek and produced seminal translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Prior to the preparation of these translations, Pope took advantage of his mastery of the classical style and also his waspish wit to compose a burlesque epic about the theft of a lock of hair. The incident that inspired Pope was related to him by his friend John Caryll. Lord Petre had cut off a lock of the hair of Arabella Fermor, whom he was courting at the time, without asking the lady's permission.

This collection arguably contains some of the most charming lyrics ever written in English. Blake’s poems can be enjoyed, not only for their historical importance in an age which was fiercely proud of its genius and its traditions, but also for their simple and beautiful expression of “two contrary states of the human soul.” Songs of Innocence was originally a complete collection of twenty-three poems, first printed in 1789. In 1794, a composite collection entitled Songs of Innocence and of Experience, containing forty-seven poems, was published.

In the Greek legend, a sculptor, Pygmalion, created a statue of a woman so beautiful that he fell in love with it. Later the goddess Aphrodite responded to his earnest prayers and brought the statue, named Galatea, to life. Shaw's Pygmalion is a fussy unmarried professor of phonetics, Henry Higgins, who claims that he could train an uneducated person off the street to speak so that he or she could pass as a member of the aristocracy. His Galatea is Eliza Doolittle, who sells flowers at Covent Garden and whose father is a dissipated but cunning vagrant.