Meet the authors

Al-Kindi was a ninth-century philosopher whose intellectual life centred on Abbasid Baghdad.

Aristotle was born in Stagira in northern Greece and spent about twenty years studying in Plato’s Academy.

Ashoka ruled the Mauryan Empire in the third century BCE.

Carl Rogers was an American psychologist whose work helped establish the person-centered approach.

Marcus Tullius Cicero was a Roman statesman, orator, and philosophical writer in the final decades of the republic.

Confucius, known in Chinese as Kongzi, asked how people might live well together amid political rivalry and weakening institutions.

Emily Dickinson spent most of her life in Amherst, Massachusetts.

Epictetus was born in Hierapolis, in present-day Turkey, and lived in Rome as an enslaved person before gaining freedom.

Epicurus was a Greek philosopher who established the school known as the Garden in Athens.

Henry David Thoreau was a writer, naturalist, and political thinker closely associated with Concord, Massachusetts.

Ibn Rushd was born in Córdoba into a family distinguished in law and religious scholarship.

John Dewey was an American philosopher whose work connected the problems of everyday experience with education and democratic life.

John Donne was born in London into a Roman Catholic family at a time of religious and political pressure.

John Green writes novels and nonfiction.

John Keats was born in London and trained in medicine before committing himself to poetry.

John Stuart Mill was a British philosopher, writer, and public figure.

Joseph Campbell was an American writer and teacher who studied recurring themes in myths across cultures.

Kabir is remembered as a poet and weaver associated with northern India, especially the region of Banaras.

Kahlil Gibran was born in Bsharri, in present-day Lebanon, then part of the Ottoman Empire.

Okakura Kakuzō, also known as Okakura Tenshin, was born in Yokohama in 1863.

Kenkō, also known as Yoshida Kenkō, was a Japanese poet and Buddhist priest whose Essays in Idleness turns the details of everyday life into occasions for thought.

Laozi is the name traditionally associated with the Daodejing, a short Chinese classic about the Dao, or Way, and the qualities of a life attuned to it.

Marcus Aurelius became Roman emperor in 161 CE and ruled until his death in 180.

Mary Wollstonecraft was an English writer who made women’s education and independence central questions of moral and political life.

Michel de Montaigne was a French writer and public figure who turned examination of his own experience into the Essays.

Plato was an Athenian philosopher whose writings made dialogue one of philosophy’s enduring forms.

Qoheleth is the teaching voice of Ecclesiastes, a book in the Hebrew Bible and Christian Old Testament.

Rainer Maria Rilke was a German-language poet born in Prague, then part of Austria-Hungary.

Ralph Waldo Emerson was an American essayist, poet and lecturer associated with the New England movement called transcendentalism.

Seneca was a Roman Stoic philosopher and statesman, born in Corduba and educated in Rome, who served as tutor and adviser to Nero.

Sima Qian was a historian at the Han court, active in the late second and early first centuries BCE.

Socrates lived in fifth-century Athens and became known for questioning people about the qualities they claimed to understand: courage, justice, piety and the good life.

The sons of Korah are not one writer with a recoverable personal biography.

Søren Kierkegaard was a Danish philosopher, theologian, and writer whose work emphasized individual responsibility and becoming oneself.

The historical teacher commonly called Gautama Buddha lived in South Asia around the fifth century BCE, although his chronology remains debated.

Walt Whitman was born on Long Island and worked as a printer, teacher and journalist before publishing the first edition of Leaves of Grass in 1855.

Wang Yangming was a Ming Chinese thinker, teacher and government official who lived from 1472 to 1529.

Zuhayr ibn Abi Sulma belongs to the Arabic poetic tradition of the period before Islam, around the late sixth and early seventh centuries.