“It is better to know a little of what is really good and worthwhile than a lot of what is mediocre and unnecessary.” - Leo Tolstoy

"…to be truly educated and enlightened is to be able to assimilate and take advantage of the entire spiritual legacy that has come down to us from our ancestors." - Leo Tolstoy

“Consider what you have in the smallest chosen library. A company of the wisest and wittiest men that could be picked out of all civil countries in a thousand years have set in best order the results of their learning and wisdom. The men themselves were hid and inaccessible, solitary, impatient of interruption, fenced by etiquette; but the thought which they did not uncover to their bosom friend is here written out in transparent words to us, the strangers of another age. We owe to books those general benefits which come from high intellectual action.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Be wary lest by reading too many writers and too many different kinds of books your brain becomes confused and addled. If you wish to extract something useful from your reading, you should feed your mind only with those writers of undoubted worth. Read therefore only those books which have been recognized as unquestionably good. And if you should ever feel the urge to turn to any other sort of book, always remember to return to the first kind.” -Seneca

“I certainly understand the value of knowing key ideas from different disciplines and building my own latticework, but I didn’t learn any of that in school, and I’d be starting from ground zero." -Charlie Munger, quoted in Robert Hagstrom’s Investing: The Last Liberal Art.

“I found out that with 150 well-chosen books a man possesses a complete analysis of all human knowledge, or at least all that is either useful or desirable to be acquainted with.” - Abbé Faria, The Count of Monte Cristo.

“Familiarity with the great works has moral, civic, social, economic, and progress-related benefits. Taken together, they give a fair history of humanity’s inventing, improving, and imagining.” - Tommy Collison

Part 1

Homer: Iliad, Odyssey

Asechylus: Agamemnon, Prometheus Bound.

Sophocles: Oedipus Rex, Antigone.

Ovid: Metamorphoses

Thucydides: History of the Peloponnesian War

Aristophanes: Clouds, Lysistrata.

Euripides: Bacchae

Plato: Meno, Gorgias, Republic, The Last Days of Socrates (Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Phaedo).

Euclid: Elements Lucretius: On the Nature of Things

Plutarch: “Lycurgus,” “Solon”

Nicomachus: Arithmetic

Lavoisier: Elements of Chemistry

Harvey: Motion of the Heart and Blood

Enchiridion of Epictetus

Seneca’s Letters from a Stoic

Aurelius: Meditations

Swift: Gulliver’s Travels, A Modest Proposal

Austen: Pride and Prejudice

Eliot: Middlemarch

Chaucer: Canterbury Tales

Mill: Autobiography

Confucius: Analects, #1–14 (Translation: Slingerland)

Chuang Tzu: The Book of Chuang Tzu

The Bhagavadgītā in the Mahābhārata (Translation: van Buitenen)

Mo Tzu: Basic Writings of Mo Tzu, Hsun Tzu, and Han Fei Tzu

Lao Tzu: The Way of Lao Tzu

Montgomery: Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations

Asimov: The Foundation Trilogy

Gibbon: The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

Part 2

The New Testament. (Read Genesis, Exodus, Deuteronomy, the Book of Job, and maybe Lamentations.)

Plato: Symposium, Parmenides, Theaetetus, Sophists, Timaeus, Phaedrus

Aristotle: Nicomachean Ethics, Eudemian Ethics, Rhetoric. Apollonius: Conics

Virgil: Aeneid

Plutarch: “Caesar,” “Cato the Younger.”

Epictetus: Discourses, Manual

Tacitus: Annals

Ptolemy: Almagest

Augustine: Confessions

St. Anselm: Proslogium

Aquinas: Summa Theologica, Summa Contra Gentiles

Dante: Divine Comedy

Des Prez: Mass

Boswell: Life of Johnson

Machiavelli: The Prince, Discourses

Copernicus: On the Revolution of the Spheres

Luther: The Freedom of a Christian, “Preface to Romans,” “Concerning Governmental Authority,” “The Twelve Articles of the Swabian Peasants,” “Friendly Admonition to Peace Concerning the Twelve Articles of the Swabian Peasants.”

Rabelais: Gargantua and Pantagruel

Palestrina: Missa Papae Marcelli

Montaigne: Essays (Of Custom, and That We Should Not Easily Change a Law Received; Of Pedantry; Of the Education of Children; That It Is Folly to Measure Truth and Error by Our Own Capacity; Of Cannibals; That the Relish of Good and Evil Depends in a Great Measure upon the Opinion We Have of Them; Upon Some Verses of Virgil).

Viete: “Introduction on the Analytical Art.”

Bacon: Novum Organum.

Shakespeare: Richard II, Henry IV, Henry V, The Tempest, As You Like It, Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, King Lear, Coriolanus, Sonnets, Antony and Cleopatra, The Winter’s Tale, Much Ado About Nothing, Twelfth Night, The Merchant of Venice.

Confucius: Analects #14–20 (Translation: Slingerland). The Rigveda.

Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby

Marquez: One Hundred Years of Solitude

Brontë: Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights

Woolf: To the Lighthouse

Heller: Catch-22

Part 3

Cervantes: Don Quixote.

Hobbes: Leviathan.

Galileo: Two New Sciences.

Descartes: Meditations, Rules for the Direction of the Mind.

Milton: Paradise Lost.

La Rochefoucauld: Maxims.

La Fontaine: Fables.

Pascal: Pensées (Numbers 72, 82-83, 100, 128, 131, 139, 142-143, 171, 194- 195, 219, 229, 233-234, 242, 273, 277, 282, 289, 298, 303, 320, 323, 325, 330-331, 374, 385, 392, 395-397, 409, 412-413, 416, 418, 425, 430, 434-435, 463, 491, 525- 531, 538, 543, 547, 553, 556, 564, 571, 586, 598, 607-610, 613, 619-620, 631, 640, 644, 673, 675, 684, 692-693, 737, 760, 768, 792-793).

Huygens: Treatise on Light, On the Movement of Bodies by Impact.

Spinoza: Theological-Political Treatise.

Locke: Second Treatise on Government.

Racine: Phaedra.

Newton: Principia Mathematica.

Kepler: Epitome IV.

Leibniz: Monadology, Discourse on Metaphysics, Essay on Dynamics, Philosophical Essays, Principles of Nature and Grace.

Frederick Douglass: Autobiography.

Hume: Treatise on Human Nature, Enquiry, Dialogues on Natural Religion, Essays.

Rousseau: The Social Contract, On the Origin of Inequality, Confessions.

Molière: The Misanthrope.

Adam Smith: Wealth of Nations.

Kant: Critique of Pure Reason, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals.

Mozart: Don Giovanni.

Francis Bacon: Essays, Civil and Moral.

Dedekind: Essays on the Theory of Numbers.

Kālidāsa, Kumārasaṃbhava: in The Origin of the Young God (Translation: Hifetz).

“Discourses on the Noble Quest,” “Discourse to Kālāmas,” and “The Greater Discourse on Cause” from Early Buddhist Discourses, edited and translated by John Holder.

Vimalakīrti Sūtra, The Holy Teaching of Vimalakīrti (Translation: Thurman).

The Tale of the Heike (Translation: McCullough).

Kūkai: “The Difference Between Exoteric and Esoteric Buddhism,” “Attaining Enlightenment in This Very Existence,” “The Meanings of Sound, Word, and Reality.”

Shōnagon: The Pillow Book.

Morrison: Beloved, Song of Solomon

Hemingway: The Sun Also Rises, The Old Man and the Sea

Rand: Atlas Shrugged.

Hesse: Siddartha.

Part 4

Articles of Confederation, Declaration of Independence, Constitution of the United States.

Voltaire: Candide.

Hamilton, Jay, and Madison: The Federalist Papers.

Darwin: Origin of Species.

Hegel: Phenomenology of Mind, “Logic” (from the Encyclopedia).

Lobachevsky: Theory of Parallels. De Tocqueville: Democracy in America.

Kierkegaard: Philosophical Fragments, Fear and Trembling. Wagner: Tristan and Isolde.

Marx: Capital, Political and Economic Manuscripts of 1844, The German Ideology.

Dostoyevsky: Brothers Karamazov

Tolstoy: War and Peace, Anna Karenina

Twain: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

O’Connor: Selected Stories

William James: Psychology: Briefer Course

Nietzsche: Birth of Tragedy, Thus Spake Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil

Freud: General Introduction to Psychoanalysis, The Interpretation of Dreams, Civilization and its Discontents, Mass Pyschology and Other Writings

Valery: Poems. Booker T. Washington: Selected Writings

Du Bois: The Souls of Black Folk

Heidegger: What Is Philosophy?

Heisenberg: The Physical Principles of the Quantum Theory

Einstein: Selected Papers

Millikan: The Electron

Dickens: David Copperfield, A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations

Conrad: Heart of Darkness

Faulkner: The Sound and the Fury, The Bear, Go Down, Moses

Melville: Benito Cereno, Moby Dick

Jayadeva: “The Gītagovinda” in Love Song of the Dark Lord, edited and translated by Barbara Stoler Miller

Kundera: The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Roth: American Pastoral, Sabbath’s Theater

Gaskell: North and South.