Lindy Books

A book that has survived centuries are likely to last even longer into the future, by Lindy Effect.

Surprisingly, old books can give us clarity about the world as they do not suffer from the distractions and facades of our modern society.

Nassim Taleb tweeted:

10 [year] old books feel very aged, out of place, out of sync.
200 year old books feel contemporary.
2000 year old bks feel fresh.

Time has helped us weed out weak books and leave us with the best ones.

Here are a list of worthy Lindy Books that are at least 100 years old (in order of publish date)

Ancient History (3000 BC – 750 AD)

• The Code of Hammurabi (1755-1750 BC)
• Hebrew Bible (1200-165 BC)
• I Ching – Fu Xi (1000 BC)
• The Art of War – Sun Tzu (475-221 BC)
• The Republic – Plato (380 BC)
• Analects – Confucius’s followers (206 BC -220 AD)
• Letters from a Stoic – Seneca (65)
• Discourses and selected writings – Epictetus (108)
• Meditations – Marcus Aurelius (161)

Middle Ages (500 – 1500)

• Tao Te Ching – Lao Tzu (600)
• The Iliad and the Odyssey – Homer (601-800)
• Quran – (610-632)
• The Travels – Marco Polo (1300)
• The Divine Comedy – Dante Alighieri (1320)
• The Canterbury Tales – Geoffrey Chaucer (1392)

Renaissance Period and Age of Discovery (1400s – 1600s) / Scientific Revolution (1543 – 1687)

• The Prince – Niccolo Machiavelli (1513)
• On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres – Nicolaus Copernicus (1543)
• Romeo and Juliet – Shakespeare (1591-1595)
• Journey to the West – Wu Cheng’en (1592)
• Macbeth – Shakespeare (1599)
• Hamlet – Shakespeare (1599-1601)
• Don Quixote – Miguel de Cervantes (1605)
• Discourse on the Method – Rene Descartes (1637)
• Meditations on First Philosophy – Rene Descartes (1641)
• Leviathan – Hobbes (1651)

Age of Enlightenment (1685 – 1815) / Industrial Revolution (1760 – 1840) / Age of Revolution (1765 – 1849)

• Principia: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy – Sir Isaac Newton (1687)
• Two Treatises of Government – John Locke (1689)
• Persian Letters – Montesquieu (1721)
• A Treatise of Human Nature – David Hume (1739-1740)
• The Spirit of Laws – Montesquieu (1748)
• Encyclopédie – Denis Diderot and Jean Ie Rond d’Alembert (1751-1772)
• Discourse on Inequality – Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1755)
• The Social Contract – Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1762)
• Common Sense – Thomas Paine (1775)
• The Wealth of Nations – Adam Smith (1776)
• Critique of Pure Reason – Immanuel Kant (1781)
• The Federalist Papers – Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Kay (1788)
• The Vindication of the Rights of Woman – Mary Wollstonecraft (1792)

Romanticism (1800 – 1850)

• Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen (1813)
• On War – Carl von Clausewitz (1832)
• The Communist Manifesto – Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (1848)
• Moby Dick – Herman Melville (1851)
• Walden – Henry David Thoreau (1854)
• Origin of Species – Charles Darwin (1859)
• On Liberty – John Stuart Mill (1859)
• Great Expectations – Charles Dickens (1861)
• Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoevsky (1866)
• War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy (1867)
• Capital – Karl Marx (1867)
• The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain (1884)
• The Art of Worldly Wisdom – Baltasar Gracian (1892)