Daily inspiration, in your language

A collection that comes with context

A quotation pulled out of its context easily becomes decoration. The same sentence reads differently once you know who wrote it and under what circumstances — Seneca wrote about tranquillity while serving an emperor who eventually ordered his death, and Epictetus wrote about freedom as a man who had spent part of his life enslaved. So every topic here opens with an introduction to where the idea comes from and how different traditions approached it, and the best-represented authors carry a note on who they were.

The collection is organised by theme rather than by popularity. Under one heading you will find Stoics, Chinese classics, German Romanticism and Croatian folk proverbs — not to flatten them into one voice, but to show how different worlds answer the same question. On some themes the answers converge; on others they openly contradict each other, and the contradiction often says more than any single line.

Everything is available in Croatian, English and German. The translations are not one text pushed through a machine: where a saying already exists in a language's own tradition, that established version is the one used, because a proverb rarely survives a literal rendering.