The textbook contains abstracts on literature, written by the author for careless students, on a variety of topics: from the works of Plato and Socrates to Bunin and Kuprin. Death and love, good and evil, light and darkness, faith and unbelief, fathers and sons - these are the themes of the book, repeated in different eras by different writers in different countries with similar and dissimilar variations. But behind all this is a suffering person, stubbornly seeking the truth, and poetry, which transforms a person, tests his strength with the help of the most important moral values. This is the essence of this book. For students of humanities faculties and not only.