1. Maxims by La Rochefoucauld Maxims has 137 pages. However, since the work consists primarily of aphorisms, most of those pages have only a few sentences on them. With enviable brevity and wit, La Rochefoucauld gives the reader invaluable insight into the human soul.
Notable Quotes:
“Love as well as fire cannot subsist without continual movement; and it ceases to live as soon as it ceases to hope or to fear.”
“It is more shameful to distrust one’s friends than to be deceived by them.”
“The mark of an extraordinary merit is to see those who envy it most are constrained to praise it.”
“Everybody speaks well of his heart, and nobody dares to speak well of his mind.”
2.Pudd’nhead Wilson by Mark Twain The only work of fiction on this list, Pudd’nhead Wilson, has 139 pages. The story begins with a young slave woman who, trying to save her child’s life, switches her light-skinned infant son with her master’s son. Twain, in his typical biting style, engages in harsh social commentary about the antebellum South, while creating a clever and entertaining story.
Notable Quotes:
“Adam was but human — this explains it all. He did not want the apple for the apple’s sake, he wanted it only because it was forbidden. The mistake was in not forbidding the serpent; then he would have eaten the serpent.”
“Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example.”
“Let us endeavor so to live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry.”
“All say, ‘how hard it is that we have to die’ — a strange complaint to come from the mouths of those who have had to live.”
3.Night by Elie Wiesel Night is only 115 pages. It’s hard to read Wiesel’s recounting of his experiences in Nazi concentration camps as a young Jewish boy. Nonetheless, it is our responsibility as humans to look directly at the atrocities committed by our species, so we may be on guard and ensure that they’re never repeated. For this reason, I’d also like to mention Hiroshima by John Hershey, which would’ve had a place on this list, except its page count (152) is just beyond the set restriction.
Notable Quotes:
“To forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time.”
“Then came the march past the victims. The two men were no longer alive. Their tongues were hanging out, swollen and bluish. But the third rope was still moving: the child, too light, was still breathing . . .
And so he remained for more than half an hour, lingering between life and death, writhing before our eyes. And we were forced to look at him at close range. He was still alive when I passed him. His tongue was still red, his eyes not yet extinguished.
Behind me, I heard the same man asking:
‘For God’s sake, where is God?’
And from within me, I heard a voice answer:
‘Where He is? This is where — hanging here from this gallows . . .’
That night, the soup tasted of corpses.”
“One day when I was able to get up, I decided to look at myself in the mirror on the opposite wall. I had not seen myself since the ghetto. From the depths of the mirror, a corpse was contemplating me. The look in his eyes as he gazed at me has never left me.”
4.Tao te Ching by Lao Tzu You can get a copy of the Tao te Ching that has about 81 pages, but it will surely be a pocket-sized edition with only a handful of words on each page. The Tao te Ching is the principal book of Taoism and overall a very important work to Chinese culture and philosophy. It discusses a philosophy of life. Perhaps in no book on Earth has wisdom been more densely packaged.
Notable Quotes:
“He who defines himself can’t know who he really is.”
“Do you have the patience to wait till your mud settles and the water is clear?
Can you remain unmoving till the right action arises by itself?”
“The Master gives himself up to whatever the moment brings.
He knows that he is going to die, and he has nothing left to hold on to: no illusions in his mind, no resistances in his body.
He doesn’t think about his actions; they flow from the core of his being.
He holds nothing back from life; therefore he is ready for death, as a man is ready for sleep after a good day’s work.”
“The world is sacred. It can’t be improved.
If you tamper with it, you’ll ruin it. If you treat it like an object, you’ll lose it.”
“When you are content to be simply yourself and don’t compare or compete, everybody will respect you.”
5.Gaia by James Lovelock At 146 pages, Gaia is the longest book on the list. Nonetheless, James Lovelock’s argument that the world (or biosphere) is a living organism is well worth the read. Every page is filled with amazing facts you’ll feel compelled to jot down and, though Lovelock is a scientist by trade, the fluid and beautifully descriptive writing style could make any author jealous.
Notable Quotes:
“We are the first organism to use the energy of sunlight to harvest information.”
“We all take our first breath of life-sustaining air and from then on we take it for granted.”
“The stupendous amount of light, heat, and hard radiation produced by a supernova event equals at its peak the total output of all the other stars in the galaxy.”
“An interesting and unexpected feature of the troposphere, not shared by the other atmospheric layers, is a division into two parts, with the line of separation near the equator. Air from the north and south does not freely mix, as any observer traveling on a ship through tropical regions will readily perceive from the difference in clarity of the skies between the clean southern and the relatively dirty northern hemispheres.”
6.Fragments by Heraclitus Fragments is 91 pages long, if the original Greek is on one page and the English translation on the next, and even then each page only has a few lines. Fragments bears that title because it is the surviving portions of the pre-Socratic, Greek philosopher’s sole work, On Nature. Nonetheless, Heraclitus has inspired great minds, from Plato to Nietzsche, for centuries.
Notable Quotes:
“Whoever cannot seek the unforeseen sees nothing for the known way is an impasse.”
“What use are these people’s wits who let themselves be led by speechmakers, in crowds, without considering how many fools and thieves they are among, and how few choose the good?
The best choose progress toward one thing, a name forever honored by the gods, while others eat their way toward sleep like nameless oxen.”
“You cannot step into the same river twice, for other waters are continually flowing on.”
“Dogs, by this same logic, bark at what they cannot understand.”
“Stupidity is doomed, therefore, to cringe at every syllable of wisdom.”
7. The Way to Wealth by Benjamin Franklin This, the shortest book on the list, comes in at just 17 pages. The Way to Wealth is a tiny, pamphlet-like book packed with wisdom relating to good financial sense. The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin would’ve been another worthy addition to this list from the brilliant Founding Father, but, alas, it was excluded because it is 152 pages long.
Notable Quotes:
“In short, the way to wealth, if you desire it, is as plain as the way to market. It depends chiefly on two words: industry and frugality. Waste neither time nor money, but make the best use of both. He that gets all he can honestly, and saves all he can, will certainly become rich.”
“Vessels large may venture more,
But little boats should keep near shore.”
“…for want of a nail the shoe was lost; for want of a shoe the horse was lost, and for want of a horse the rider was lost, being overtaken and slain by the enemy, all for want of care about a horse-shoe nail.”
“At the working man’s house hunger looks in, but dares not enter.”
“We may make these times better, if we better ourselves.”
8.The Lessons of History by Will & Ariel Durant The Lessons of History is 102 pages long. This husband-and-wife duo, Will and Ariel Durant, won the Pulitzer Prize for their 11-volume work The History of Civilization, which basically covers the entire history of Western civilization. In this much, much shorter work, the couple discloses in a series of essays the lessons they’ve gleaned from their work on The History of Civilization.
Notable Quotes:
“The only real revolution is in the enlightenment of the mind and the improvement of character, the only real emancipation is individual, and the only real revolutionists are philosophers and saints.”
“Democracy is the most difficult of all forms of government, since it requires the widest spread of intelligence,and we forgot to make ourselves intelligent when we made ourselves sovereign.”
“If race or class war divides us into hostile camps, changing political argument into blind hate, one side or the other may overturn the hustings with the rule of the sword. If our economy of freedom fails to distribute wealth as ably as it has created it, the road to dictatorship will be open to any man who can persuasively promise security to all; and a martial government, under whatever charming phrases, will engulf the democratic world.”
“We have multiplied a hundred times our ability to learn and report the events of the day and the planet, but at times we envy our ancestors, whose peace was only gently disturbed by the news of their village.”
“History is so indifferently rich that a case for almost any conclusion from it can be made by a selection of instances.”
9.Enchiridion by Epictetus Enchiridion is 30 pages long. Epictetus was a Greek philosopher and prominent figure among the Stoics. Enchiridion discusses a way of life that brings contentment through acceptance. Having been born a slave and later becoming crippled, Epictetus was in a position of authority to speak on dealing with life’s difficulties.
Notable Quotes:
“He is the master of every man who has the power over the things, which another person wishes or does not wish, the power to confer them or take them away. Whoever then wishes to be free, let him neither wish for anything nor avoid anything which depends on others: if he does not observe this rule, he must be a slave.”
“Wealth consists not in having great possessions, but in having few wants.”
“Don’t explain your philosophy. Embody it.”
“Any person capable of angering you becomes your master; he can anger you only when you permit yourself to be disturbed by him.”
“People are not disturbed by things, but by the views they take of them.”
10. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave by Frederick Douglass This essential book is only 106 pages long. With some historical works there is an abundant recounting of the facts but scarce discussion of the insights of the experience. However, as Douglass discusses the effects of slavery — dehumanizing slaveholders and slaves alike, corrupting religion into a rationalization for sundry atrocities, and requiring every sort of evil tool and practice for its maintenance — he paints a vivid and telling experience of life in the antebellum South. Every person, and certainly every American, should read this book.
Notable Quotes:
“Our food was coarse corn meal boiled. This was called mush. It was put into a large wooden tray or trough, and set down upon the ground. The children were then called, like so many pigs, and like so many pigs they would come and devour the mush; some with oystershells, others with pieces of shingle, some with naked hands, and none with spoons. He that ate fastest got most; he that was strongest secured the best place; and few left the trough satisfied.”
“I remember only the day of the week, for at that time I had no knowledge of the days of the month, nor the months of the year.”
“That which to him was a great evil, to be carefully shunned, was to me a great good, to be diligently sought; and the argument which he so warmly urged, against my learning to read, only served to inspire me with a desire and determination to learn.”
“The moral which I gained from the dialogue was the power of truth over the conscience of even a slaveholder.”
“A single word from the white men was enough — against all our wishes, prayers, and entreaties — to sunder forever the dearest friends, dearest kindred, and strongest ties known to human beings.”
“It is my opinion that thousands would escape from slavery, who now remain, but for the strong cords of affection that bind them to their friends. The thought of leaving my friends was decidedly the most painful thought with which I had to contend.”
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