About this collection

What is collected

This library gathers passages about how people have found peace: in difficulty, in fear of what is coming, and in conflict with each other. It collects across religious, philosophical, secular, divinatory and New Thought sources, and keeps a few folk customs besides. It shelves them by the situation a reader might arrive with rather than by tradition.

Passages are selected for what they say about living with other people and with oneself — compassion, patience, forgiveness, grief, and the ordinary business of being unable to fix something. That is the collecting interest of this library, and it is a choice about what to gather, not a claim about what any tradition teaches.

What the feed hands you

Today’s set is the one place here that chooses on your behalf. If there is a kind of writing you would rather not be handed, turn it off and the feed will stop offering it. Nothing is removed from the collection — every passage stays in the library, on its tradition’s page and in the concept map, and you can still open any of it deliberately.

Stored on this device, like the theme. Nothing is sent anywhere.

• ScriptureshownTexts read as scripture by their traditions.
• DivinationshownAstrology and other practices of reading meaning from signs.
• PracticeshownInstructions a tradition gives for what to do.
• ResearchshownFindings from published psychological and neuroscientific work.
• PhilosophyshownArguments from the philosophical schools.
• ReflectionshownProse written for this collection.

What this library does not do

It does not say which tradition is correct, and it does not say that they agree. No page here compares one tradition to another, summarises what several of them have in common, or arranges them in an order of merit. The only prose written about a passage answers one question — what is happening in this passage — and it never mentions another tradition.

Where traditions are shelved under the same situation, each one states the question in its own words first. The wording usually differs, and the difference is left standing rather than resolved.

How passages are labelled

Everything carries a label above it saying what kind of thing it is — scripture read as scripture by its tradition, a philosophical argument, an instruction for practice, a divination practice, a reflection written for this collection, or something kept purely for amusement. Each label says what the thing is. None of them says whether it works; that goes for the horoscope and the sutta alike.

Pages shelved by situation hold whatever is offered as guidance by its own tradition — which includes divination. Fortunes, replies and paper novelties live in their own space instead, not because they are worth less but because they are not claiming to advise you about your situation. Reverent and playful material are never shown in the same view. These rules are enforced when the site is built, not left to editorial care.

Texts and rights

Every text here is reproduced from a public domain or CC0 source and is shown with its translator, edition and licence. Each passage records the address the text was checked against, so any reader can compare it with the original. A source whose rights are unresolved cannot be published: the build fails instead.

Passages are kept long enough to be read as themselves. Short quotations detached from their setting are not collected.

What this can never become

The promises this collection makes about what it will not do are written down as a constitution, and most of them are held by something that fails rather than by anyone’s good intentions — a gate that stops the build, a test that would go red, a shape in the content model with nowhere to put the thing it forbids.

Each article says which of the two it is. Where nothing in code can prove a promise, it says that too, rather than dressing an intention up as a guarantee.

Where this collection speaks for itself

Everything above is about keeping the library’s own voice out of the way. There is one place it is not kept out: Colophon holds notes from the people who assemble this collection, about the collection — how it is made, what it will not do, and where it is thin.

Those notes are never shelved under a situation and never appear in the daily set. They are about the project, not about which tradition is right, and the same rule against ranking or adjudicating applies to them as to everything else written here. Each one is read back against that rule before it publishes, and says on its own page whether that has happened yet.

If you are in crisis

This is a library, not a service, and nothing in it is medical or psychological advice. If you are in immediate danger or thinking about harming yourself, contact your local emergency number or a crisis line in your country — in the United States and Canada, call or text 988; in the United Kingdom and Ireland, call 116 123.