This list seems to be a fantastic curated list of some shorter philosophical works created by brilliant authors. Great ideas are always interesting to read, so I have decided to try to read them all, though it might take some years or decades.
Some of the books are exerpts of bigger works, so where I feel inclined I try to read the complete work rather than the actual exerpt used in this series. For example, instead of reading “Being happy” by Epicurus, I read all his surviving works (which are suprisingly few).
Status: 13/120
Series one
✅ On the Shortness of Life - Seneca
✅ Meditations - Marcus Aurelius
✖️ Confessions - Augustine
✖️ The Inner Life - Thomas à Kempis
✖️ The Prince - Niccolò Machiavelli
✖️ On Friendship - Michel de Montaigne
✖️ A Tale of a Tub - Jonathan Swift
✖️ The Social Contract - Jean-Jacques Rousseau
✖️ The Christians and the Fall of Rome - Edward Gibbon
✖️ Common Sense - Thomas Paine
✖️ A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Mary Wollstonecraft
✖️ On the Pleasure of Hating - William Hazlitt
✅ The Communist Manifesto - Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
✖️ On the Suffering of the World - Arthur Schopenhauer
✖️ On Art and Life - John Ruskin
✖️ On Natural Selection - Charles Darwin
✖️ Why I Am So Wise - Friedrich Nietzsche
✖️ A Room of One’s Own - Virginia Woolf
✖️ Civilization and Its Discontents - Sigmund Freud
✖️ Why I Write - George Orwell
Series two
✖️ The First Ten Books - Confucius
✅ The Art of War - Sun Tzu
✖️ The Symposium - Plato
✖️ Sensation and Sex - Lucretius
✖️ An Attack on the Enemy of Freedom - Cicero
✖️ The Revelation of St John the Divine and The Book of Job
✖️ Travels in the Land of Kublai Khan - Marco Polo
✖️ The City of Ladies - Christine de Pizan
✖️ How to Achieve True Greatness - Baldesar Castiglione
✖️ Of Empire - Francis Bacon
✖️ Of Man - Thomas Hobbes
✖️ Urne-Burial - Sir Thomas Browne
✖️ Miracles and Idolatry - Voltaire
✖️ On Suicide - David Hume
✖️ On the Nature of War - Carl von Clausewitz
✖️ Fear and Trembling - Søren Kierkegaard
✖️ Where I Lived, and What I Lived For - Henry David Thoreau
✖️ Conspicuous Consumption - Thorstein Veblen
✅ The Myth of Sisyphus - Albert Camus
✖️ Eichmann and the Holocaust - Hannah Arendt
Series three
✖️ In Consolation to his Wife - Plutarch
✖️ Some Anatomies of Melancholy - Robert Burton
✖️ Human Happiness - Blaise Pascal
✖️ The Invisible Hand - Adam Smith
✖️ The Evils of Revolution - Edmund Burke
✅ Nature - Ralph Waldo Emerson
✖️ The Sickness Unto Death - Søren Kierkegaard
✖️ The Lamp of Memory - John Ruskin
✖️ Man Alone with Himself - Friedrich Nietzsche
✖️ A Confession - Leo Tolstoy
✖️ Useful Work versus Useless Toil - William Morris
✖️ The Significance of the Frontier in American History - Frederick Jackson Turner
✖️ Days of Reading - Marcel Proust
✖️ An Appeal to the Toiling, Oppressed and Exhausted Peoples of Europe - Leon Trotsky
✅ The Future of an Illusion - Sigmund Freud
✖️ The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction - Walter Benjamin
✖️ Books v. Cigarettes - George Orwell
✖️ The Fastidious Assassins - Albert Camus
✖️ Concerning Violence - Frantz Fanon
✖️ The Spectacle of the Scaffold - Michel Foucault
Series four
✅ Tao Te Ching - Lao-Tzu
✖️ Writings from the Zen Masters - Various
✖️ Utopia - Thomas More
✖️ On Solitude - Michel de Montaigne
✖️ On Power - William Shakespeare
✖️ Of the Abuse of Words - John Locke
✖️ Consolation in the Face of Death - Samuel Johnson
✖️ An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment? - Immanuel Kant
✖️ The Executioner - Joseph de Maistre
✖️ Confessions of an English Opium-Eater - Thomas de Quincey
✖️ The Horrors and Absurdities of Religion - Arthur Schopenhauer
✖️ The Gettysburg Address - Abraham Lincoln
✖️ Revolution and War - Karl Marx
✖️ The Grand Inquisitor - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
✖️ On A Certain Blindness in Human Beings - William James
✖️ An Apology for Idlers - Robert Louis Stevenson
✖️ Of the Dawn of Freedom - W. E. B. Du Bois
✖️ Thoughts of Peace in an Air Raid - Virginia Woolf
✖️ Decline of the English Murder - George Orwell
✅ Why Look at Animals? - John Berger
Series five
✖️ The Tao of Nature - Chuang Tzu
✖️ Of Human Freedom - Epictetus
✖️ On Conspiracies - Niccolò Machiavelli
✖️ Meditations - René Descartes
✖️ Dialogue Between Fashion and Death - Giacomo Leopardi
✅ On Liberty - John Stuart Mill
✖️ Hosts of Living Forms - Charles Darwin
✖️ Night Walks - Charles Dickens
✖️ Some Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Charles Mackay
✖️ The State as a Work of Art - Jacob Burckhardt
✖️ Silly Novels by Lady Novelists - George Eliot
✖️ The Painter of Modern Life - Charles Baudelaire
✖️ The ‘Wolfman’ - Sigmund Freud
✖️ The Jewish State - Theodor Herzl
✖️ Nationalism - Rabindranath Tagore
✖️ Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism - Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
✖️ We Will All Go Down Fighting to the End - Winston Churchill
✖️ The Perpetual Race of Achilles and the Tortoise - Jorge Luis Borges
✖️ Some Thoughts on the Common Toad - George Orwell
✖️ An Image of Africa - Chinua Achebe
Series six
✖️ One Swallow Does Not Make a Summer - Aristotle
✅ Being Happy - Epicurus
✅ How To Be a Stoic - Marcus Aurelius, Seneca and Epictetus
✖️ Three Japanese Buddhist Monks - Yoshida Kenkō, Kamo no Chōmei and Saigyō Hōshi
✖️ Ain’t I A Woman? - Sojourner Truth
✖️ Anarchist Communism - Peter Kropotkin
✖️ God is Dead - Friedrich Nietzsche
✖️ The Decay of Lying - Oscar Wilde
✖️ Suffragette Manifestos - Various
✖️ Bushido: The Soul of Japan - Inazo Nitobe
✖️ The Freedom to Be Free - Hannah Arendt
✖️ What Is Existentialism? - Simone de Beauvoir
✖️ The Power of Words - Simone Weil
✅ Reflections on the Guillotine - Albert Camus
✖️ The Narrative of Trajan’s Column - Italo Calvino
✖️ A Tough Mind and a Tender Heart - Martin Luther King Jr.
✖️ Steps Towards a Small Theory of the Visible - John Berger
✖️ When I Dare to Be Powerful - Audre Lorde
✅ Brief Notes on the Art and Manner of Arranging One’s Books - Georges Perec
✅ Why Vegan? - Peter Singer