100 Most Influential Books Ever Written
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This page keeps track of which of the 100 Most Influential Books Ever Written according to Martin Seymour-Smith are on Project Gutenberg.
| Author | Title | Date | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Jewish scripture | Torah | 13th-4th century BCE | As part of the Bible |
| Chinese classic text | I Ching | late 9th century BCE | Not in PG |
| Homer | Iliad and Odyssey | 8th-early 7th century BCE | various editions |
| Hindu scripture | Upanishads | 7th-5th century BCE | etext:3283 |
| Lao Tsu | Tao Te Ching | 3rd century BCE | etext:216 (en), etext:7337 (zh) |
| Zoroastrian scripture | Avesta | 3rd century BCE-3rd century AD | not in PG |
| Confucius | Analects | 5th-4th century BCE | etext:3330 (en), etext:23839 (zh) |
| Thucydides | History of the Peloponnesian War | 5th century BCE | etext:7142 (en), etext:29833 to etext:29836 (el) |
| Hippocrates | Works | 400 BCE | Not extant |
| Aristotle | Works | 4th century BCE | various works |
| Herodotus | Histories | 4th century BCE | etext:2707+etext:2456 (en) |
| Plato | The Republic | 380 BCE | etext:150 (en), etext:1497 (en) |
| Euclid | Elements | 280 BCE | etext:21076 only books 1-6 (of 13), clearance 2008 |
| Buddhist scripture | Dhammapada (Path of the Dharma) | 252 BCE | etext:2017 (en), etext:35185 (en) |
| Virgil | Aeneid | 19 BCE | various editions |
| Lucretius | On the Nature of Things | 55 BCE | etext:785 |
| Philo of Alexandria | Allegorical Expositions of the Holy Law | 1st century AD | not in PG |
| Christian scripture | New Testament | 50-100 AD | As part of the Bible |
| Plutarch | Parallel Lives | 120 AD | various editions and excerpts |
| Cornelius Tacitus | Annals, From the Death of the Divine Augustus | 120 AD | Parts, also in DP |
| Valentinus | Gospel of Truth (Gnostic text) | 2nd century AD | not in PG (copyrighted?) |
| Marcus Aurelius | Meditations | 167 AD | various editions |
| Sextus Empiricus | Pyrrhonism | 150-210 AD | not in PG |
| Plotinus | Enneads | 3rd century AD | Copyright clearance on Selected Works, 2010 |
| Augustine of Hippo | Confessions | 400 AD | etext:3296 (en), etext:33849 (la) |
| Muslim scripture | Quran | 7th century AD | various editions |
| Moses Maimonides | Guide for the Perplexed | 1190 | Copyright clearance 2010 |
| Judaic mysticism | Kabbalah | 12th century | not a specific text |
| Thomas Aquinas | Summa Theologiae | 1266-1273 | etext:17611+etext:17897+etext:18755+etext:19950 (en) |
| Dante Alighieri | The Divine Comedy | 1321 | many editions |
| Desiderius Erasmus | In Praise of Folly | 1509 | etext:9371 (en), etext:30201 (en), etext:27846 (nl) |
| Niccolo Machiavelli | The Prince | 1532 | etext:1232 (en), etext:15772 (en) |
| Martin Luther | On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church | 1520 | part of etext:34904 (en) |
| Francois Rabelais | Gargantua and Pantagruel | 1534 & 1532 | etext:1200 (en), etext:8166 to etext:8170] (en) |
| John Calvin | Institutes of the Christian Religion | 1536 | copyright clearance 2010 |
| Nicolaus Copernicus | On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres | 1543 | not in PG |
| Michael Eyquem de Montaigne | Essays | 1580 | etext:3600 (en) |
| Miguel de Cervantes | Don Quixote | 1605 & 1615 | several versions |
| Johannes Kepler | Harmony of the Worlds | 1619 | not in PG |
| Francis Bacon | Novum Organum | 1620 | in PP |
| William Shakespeare | First Folio | 1623 | in parts, many editions |
| Galileo Galilei | Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems | 1632 | not in PG |
| Rene Descartes | Discourse on Method | 1637 | etext:13846 (fr), etext:59 (en), etext:15085 (fi). etext:25830 (en) |
| Thomas Hobbes | Leviathan | 1651 | etext:3207 (en) |
| Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz | Works | 1663-1716 | not a specific text |
| Blaise Pascal | Pensées | 1670 | etext:18269 (en) |
| Baruch de Spinoza | Ethics | 1677 | etext:15497 (nl), etext:3800 (en) |
| John Bunyan | Pilgrim's Progress | 1678-1684 | etext:131 |
| Isaac Newton | Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy | 1687 | etext:28233 (la) |
| John Locke | Essay Concerning Human Understanding | 1689 | etext:10615+etext:10616 (en) |
| George Berkeley | Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge | 1710, revised 1734 | etext:4723 |
| Giambattista Vico | The New Science | 1725, revised 1744 | copyright clearance 2008 (fr) |
| David Hume | A Treatise of Human Nature | 1739-1740 | etext:4705 |
| Denis Diderot (ed.) | Encyclopédie | 1751-1772 | not in PG |
| Samuel Johnson | A Dictionary of the English Language | 1755 | etext:5430 - only the preface, copyright clearance 2011 |
| Francois-Marie de Voltaire | Candide | 1759 | etext:19942 (en), etext:1709 (es), etext:4650 (fr) |
| Thomas Paine | Common Sense | 1776 | etext:147, etext:3755 (en) |
| Adam Smith | The Wealth of Nations | 1776 | etext:3300 (en) |
| Edward Gibbon | The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire | 1776-1787 | etext:731-etext:736 and etext:890-etext:895, etext:900 (en) |
| Immanuel Kant | Critique of Pure Reason | 1781, revised 1787 | etext:4280 (en), etext:6342 (de/1781), etext:6343 (de/1787) |
| Jean-Jacques Rousseau | Confessions | 1781 | etext:3901-etext:3913 (en) |
| Edmund Burke | Reflections on the Revolution in France | 1790 | part of etext:15679 (en) |
| Mary Wollstonecraft | Vindication of the Rights of Woman | 1792 | etext:3420 |
| William Godwin | An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice | 1793 | not in PG |
| Thomas Robert Malthus | An Essay on the Principle of Population | 1798, revised 1803 | etext:4239 (en) |
| George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel | Phenomenology of Spirit | 1807 | etext:6698 (de) |
| Arthur Schopenhauer | The World as Will and Idea | 1819 | etext:38427+etext:40097+etext:40868 (en) |
| Auguste Comte | Course in the Positivist Philosophy | 1830-1842 | etext:31881, etext:31882, etext:31883, etext:31947, dpproject:projectID446ff259200bf, dpproject:projectID447a6908a1535 |
| Carl Marie von Clausewitz | On War | 1832 | etext:36693 (de), etext:1946 (en; only volume 1) |
| Soren Kierkegaard | Either/Or | 1843 | not in PG |
| Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels | Communist Manifesto | 1848 | etext:61, etext:31193 (en) |
| Henry David Thoreau | Civil Disobedience | 1849 | etext:71 (en) |
| Charles Darwin | The Origin of Species | 1859 | various editions |
| John Stuart Mill | On Liberty | 1859 | etext:34901 (en) |
| Herbert Spencer | First Principles | 1862 | etext:55046 (en) |
| Gregor Mendel | Experiments on Plant Hybridization | 1866 | Gone through DP (de) |
| Leo Tolstoy | War and Peace | 1868-1869 | etext:2600 (en), etext:17949+etext:17950+etext:17951 (fr) |
| James Clerk Maxwell | Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism | 1873 | Copyright clearance 2008 |
| Friedrich Nietzsche | Thus Spake Zarathustra | 1883-1885 | etext:1998 (en), etext:5258 (fr), etext:7205 (de) |
| Sigmund Freud | The Interpretation of Dreams | 1900 | etext:40739 (de), etext:66048 (en) |
| William James | Pragmatism | 1908 | etext:5116 (en) |
| Albert Einstein | Relativity: The special and the general theory | 1916 | etext:5001, etext:30155, etext:36114 (en) |
| Vilfredo Pareto | The Mind and Society | 1916 | not in PG |
| Carl Gustav Jung | Psychological Types | 1921 | Copyright clearance 2008 (de) |
| Martin Buber | I and Thou | 1923 | copyrighted |
| Franz Kafka | The Trial | 1925 | copyrighted |
| Karl Popper | The Logic of Scientific Discovery | 1934 | copyrighted |
| John Maynard Keynes | General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money | 1936 | copyrighted |
| Jean-Paul Sartre | Being and Nothingness | 1943 | copyrighted |
| Friedrich von Hayek | The Road to Serfdom | 1944 | copyrighted |
| Simone de Beauvoir | The Second Sex | 1948 | copyrighted |
| Norbert Wiener | Cybernetics | 1948, revised 1961 | copyrighted |
| George Orwell | Nineteen Eighty-Four | 1949 | copyrighted |
| George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff | Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson | 1950 | copyrighted |
| Ludwig Wittgenstein | Philosophical Investigations | 1953 | copyrighted |
| Noam Chomsky | Syntactic Structures | 1957 | copyrighted |
| Thomas Kuhn | The Structure of Scientific Revolutions | 1962, revised 1970 | copyrighted |
| Betty Friedan | The Feminine Mystique | 1963 | copyrighted |
| Mao Zedong | Quotations From Chairman Mao Tse-tung (Little Red Book) | 1966 | copyrighted? |
| B. F. Skinner | Beyond Freedom and Dignity | 1971 | copyrighted |