Monday, August 2, 2021

Organize your Home Library. Books - the Greatest Treasure of Mankind

Organize your Home Library.
Books - the Greatest Treasure of Mankind

Dr Abe V Rotor


Author inspects piles of personal collection of books for his home library. 
Books are catalogued and displayed in glass cabinets and on shelves. 
San Vicente, IIocos Sur.

Books, once the privilege of a few in pre-printing machine era, each page painstakingly handwritten, each book a well-kept treasure.

Books, the authority, the final say, unquestioned, un-refuted, else any one rising contrary faces punishment, including death or damnation.

Books, the diary, the ledger, the document of conquest and discovery, of battles fought, often in favor of the writer and party.

Books, the novels that carry the greatest stories of all times are called classics, for which they are regarded timeless for their universal values.

Books, the epics of Homer, stories of the Grimm Brothers distilled from oral literature passed through generations to the present.

Books, written ahead of their time - Galileo's astronomy, Darwin's evolution, Martin Luther's Protestantism ignited dis-pleasured of the Church.

Books, bedtime stories, baby's introduction to the world, legends and fantasies that take young ones to the land of make believe.

Books, the record of ultimate scholarship, are the epitome of the greatest minds in thesis and dissertation, theories and principles.

Books, the precursor of the Internet, the framework of the i-Pod, Tablet, Galaxy, and other gadgets that man becomes a walking encyclopedia.

Books, the progeny of the earliest forms of writing like the cuneiform, hieroglyphics, caves drawings, etchings, scrolls of the Dead Sea.

Books, that gave the idea and structure of the Wonders of the Ancient World, and the significance and belief for which they were built.

Books, that grew with knowledge, brought new schools and movements in arts and philosophy, in unending search for truth.

Books, the most widely read, the Bible; the shortest, Albert Einstein’s e=mc2, and book-to-cinema versions of Spielberg, Lucas, Cecile de Mills et al.

Books, the greatest treasure of mankind, its collective attributes as humanity, the very stimulus of man's rationality to rise above other creatures - and himself.

Books, that brought about man's disobedience to his creator, playing god, and questioning if god made man, or that man made god.

Books that enlighten man to care for the environment, guide the young and future generations to a better future, and lead man to save his own species from extinction.

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Author's Note: Herein below is one of the lists of top 100 books of the world. There is no standard for comparison, only preferences by different sources. However, there are books that consistently appear in many lists.

100 Most Influential Books Ever Written
by Martin Seymour-Smith
Note: This list is in chronological order. 

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

Source: Seymour-Smith, Martin. 100 Most Influential Books Ever Written. Secaucus, N.J.: Citadel Press, 1998. © 1998 Martin Seymour-Smith. From the Internet

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