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100 Most Influential Books ever written

david_dawei

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david_dawei

david_dawei

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100 Most Influential Books Ever Written

by Martin Seymour-Smith

http://www.interleaves.org/~rteeter/grtinfluential.html

 

1. The I Ching

2. The Old Testament

3. The Iliad and The Odyssey by Homer

4. The Upanishads

5. The Way and Its Power, Lao-tzu

6. The Avesta

7. Analects, Confucius

8. History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides

9. Works, Hippocrates

10. Works, Aristotle

11. History, Herodotus

12. The Republic, Plato

13. Elements, Euclid

14. The Dhammapada

15. Aeneid, Virgil

16. On the Nature of Reality, Lucretius

17. Allegorical Expositions of the Holy Laws, Philo of Alexandria

18. The New Testament

19. Lives, Plutarch

20. Annals, from the Death of the Divine Augustus, Cornelius Tacitus

21. The Gospel of Truth

22. Meditations, Marcus Aurelius

23. Outlines of Pyrrhonism, Sextus Empiricus

24. Enneads, Plotinus

25. Confessions, Augustine of Hippo

26. The Koran

27. Guide for the Perplexed, Moses Maimonides

28. The Kabbalah

29. Summa Theologicae, Thomas Aquinas

30. The Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri

31. In Praise of Folly, Desiderius Erasmus

32. The Prince, Niccolò Machiavelli

33. On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church, Martin Luther

34. Gargantua and Pantagruel, François Rabelais

35. Institutes of the Christian Religion, John Calvin

36. On the Revolution of the Celestial Orbs, Nicolaus Copernicus

37. Essays, Michel Eyquem de Montaigne

38. Don Quixote, Parts I and II, Miguel de Cervantes

39. The Harmony of the World, Johannes Kepler

40. Novum Organum, Francis Bacon

41. The First Folio [Works], William Shakespeare

42. Dialogue Concerning Two New Chief World Systems, Galileo Galilei

43. Discourse on Method, René Descartes

44. Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes

45. Works, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

46. Pensées, Blaise Pascal

47. Ethics, Baruch de Spinoza

48. Pilgrim's Progress, John Bunyan

49. Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, Isaac Newton

50. Essay Concerning Human Understanding, John Locke

51. The Principles of Human Knowledge, George Berkeley

52. The New Science, Giambattista Vico

53. A Treatise of Human Nature, David Hume

54. The Encyclopedia, Denis Diderot, ed.

55. A Dictionary of the English Language, Samuel Johnson

56. Candide, François-Marie de Voltaire

57. Common Sense, Thomas Paine

58. An Enquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith

59. The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon

60. Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant

61. Confessions, Jean-Jacques Rousseau

62. Reflections on the Revolution in France, Edmund Burke

63. Vindication of the Rights of Women, Mary Wollstonecraft

64. An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, William Godwin

65. An Essay on the Principle of Population, Thomas Robert Malthus

66. Phenomenology of Spirit, George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

67. The World as Will and Idea, Arthur Schopenhauer

68. Course in the Positivist Philosophy, Auguste Comte

69. On War, Carl Marie von Clausewitz

70. Either/Or, Søren Kierkegaard

71. The Manifesto of the Communist Party, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

72. "Civil Disobedience," Henry David Thoreau

73. The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, Charles Darwin

74. On Liberty, John Stuart Mill

75. First Principles, Herbert Spencer

76. "Experiments with Plant Hybrids," Gregor Mendel

77. War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy

78. Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism, James Clerk Maxwell

79. Thus Spake Zarathustra, Friedrich Nietzsche

80. The Interpretation of Dreams, Sigmund Freud

81. Pragmatism, William James

82. Relativity, Albert Einstein

83. The Mind and Society, Vilfredo Pareto

84. Psychological Types, Carl Gustav Jung

85. I and Thou, Martin Buber

86. The Trial, Franz Kafka

87. The Logic of Scientific Discovery, Karl Popper

88. The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, John Maynard Keynes

89. Being and Nothingness, Jean-Paul Sartre

90. The Road to Serfdom, Friedrich von Hayek

91. The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir

92. Cybernetics, Norbert Wiener

93. Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell

94. Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson, George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff

95. Philosophical Investigations, Ludwig Wittgenstein

96. Syntactic Structures, Noam Chomsky

97. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, T. S. Kuhn

98. The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan

99. Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung [The Little Red Book], Mao Zedong

100. Beyond Freedom and Dignity, B. F. Skinner

 

 

I have maybe read from about 20 something of these...

Edited by DavidZixuan (see edit history)
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david_dawei

david_dawei

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3. The Iliad and The Odyssey by Homer

 

i didnt realize Homer was so Intellectual

 

http://img.lenta.ru/news/2005/10/24/homer/picture.jpg

Influential does not mean intellectual.

 

I'm going to give the CFL cliff notes on this:

 

Man is a beast whose anger is best captured in War...

 

What better way to describe that than a war over a babe who runs away with a lover and the offended husband-king claims victimization.

 

"Helen of Troy"... who is really of Spartan... but few care... After the war-avoiding lover Paris was killed, his brother married the babe.. who was then killed by the husband-king-now-victimized-twiced.... who raised his sword to kill his unfaithful (twice) wife, but let it drop by his side upon remembrance of her beauty (and his lack of getting some). Thus, they were for a time back together...

 

This seems to be the fate of Helen and Menelaus.. yet, this is the fate of some on CFL as well :ph34r:

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izus

izus

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3. The Iliad and The Odyssey by Homer

 

i didnt realize Homer was so Intellectual

 

http://img.lenta.ru/news/2005/10/24/homer/picture.jpg

Influential does not mean intellectual.

 

I'm going to give the CFL cliff notes on this:

 

Man is a beast whose anger is best captured in War...

 

What better way to describe that than a war over a babe who runs away with a lover and the offended husband-king claims victimization.

 

"Helen of Troy"... who is really of Spartan... but few care... After the war-avoiding lover Paris was killed, his brother married the babe.. who was then killed by the husband-king-now-victimized-twiced.... who raised his sword to kill his unfaithful (twice) wife, but let it drop by his side upon remembrance of her beauty (and his lack of getting some). Thus, they were for a time back together...

 

This seems to be the fate of Helen and Menelaus.. yet, this is the fate of some on CFL as well :ph34r:

 

well then now i know i got the wrong Homer

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Rakkasan

Rakkasan

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The book is a difficult read to say the least, but the movie wasn't able to cover the internal struggles that were going on with the gods at the same time as the battle of Troy. I understand that it would be alot to cover in a movie, but Hollywood could have done a better job.

 

David, you forgot "State of Fear" by Michael Crichton or "An American Soldier" by General Tommy Franks maybe they are 101 and 102... :happybday:

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tywy_99

tywy_99

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I read that book in High School. The movie is better.

The Brad Pitt movie 'Troy' was awesome! Did you see how he killed that big dude on the battlefield in front of everyone?...WoW!!

 

Troy is not the movie.

 

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118414/

I remember seeing that. I remember Armand Assante going to hell...lol.

The trouble with that 'made-4-TV' movie was that it left out one of the most touching scenes of the book. It left out the scene when Odysseus returned home in disguise, only the dog knew who he was. After seeing Odysseus, the dog, being old in age and waiting twenty years for its master to return home, was content. Being contented and knowing its master will save all, the old dog laid down and died.

That is one of my most favorite stories in the whole book and the one I remember the most, so you can see how I was disappointed when the movie left out the scene about the dog.

The movie was okay, though. I like Armand Assante.

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Randy W

Randy W

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I read that book in High School. The movie is better.

The Brad Pitt movie 'Troy' was awesome! Did you see how he killed that big dude on the battlefield in front of everyone?...WoW!!

 

Troy is not the movie.

 

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118414/

 

The Illiad and the Odyssey are actually two different books - The Illiad is the story of the siege of Troy, while the Odyssey is the story of Odysseus' return home - each lasting 10 years.

 

Troy the movie is from the Illiad, while The Odyssey is from (guess which) The Odyssey.

Edited by Randy W (see edit history)
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izus

izus

Posted
Posted

I read that book in High School. The movie is better.

The Brad Pitt movie 'Troy' was awesome! Did you see how he killed that big dude on the battlefield in front of everyone?...WoW!!

 

Troy is not the movie.

 

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118414/

 

The Illiad and the Odyssey are actually two different books - The Illiad is the story of the siege of Troy, while the Odyssey is the story of Odysseus' return home - each lasting 10 years.

 

Troy the movie is from the Illiad, while The Odyssey is from (guess which) The Odyssey.

 

 

The Odyssey movie was done well i thought, i still think the Simpsons movie will take top honors :D

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tywy_99

tywy_99

Posted
Posted

I read that book in High School. The movie is better.

The Brad Pitt movie 'Troy' was awesome! Did you see how he killed that big dude on the battlefield in front of everyone?...WoW!!

 

Troy is not the movie.

 

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118414/

 

The Illiad and the Odyssey are actually two different books - The Illiad is the story of the siege of Troy, while the Odyssey is the story of Odysseus' return home - each lasting 10 years.

 

Troy the movie is from the Illiad, while The Odyssey is from (guess which) The Odyssey.

 

 

The Odyssey movie was done well i thought, i still think the Simpsons movie will take top honors :D

Yeah, it was okay but the cast was a bit lame though, I mean, come on,,,Eric Roberts and Vanessa Williams???...:lol:

But I guess that Armand Assante and Christopher Lee balanced it out nicely.

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