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 and divinatory 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 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.

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.