| 1 | Chinese classic texts | I Ching | 11th century BC |
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| 2 | Jewish scripture | Hebrew Bible | 8th–4th century BC |
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| 3 | Homer | Iliad and Odyssey | 8th – early 7th century BC |
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| 4 | Hindu scripture | Upanishads | 9th[1] – 6th[1] Century BC |
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| 5 | Lao Tsu | Tao Te Ching | 4th century BC |
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| 6 | Zoroastrian scripture | Avesta | 1st millennium BC – 3rd century AD |
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| 7 | Confucius | Analects | 5th–4th century BC |
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| 8 | Thucydides | History of the Peloponnesian War | 5th century BC |
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| 9 | Hippocrates | Works | 400 BC |
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| 10 | Aristotle | Works | 4th century BC |
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| 11 | Herodotus | Histories | 5th century BC |
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| 12 | Plato | The Republic | 380 BC |
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| 13 | Euclid | Elements | 280 BC |
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| 14 | Theravada Buddhist scripture | Dhammapada (Path of the Dharma) | 252 BC |
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| 15 | Virgil | Aeneid | 19 BC |
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| 16 | Lucretius | De Rerum Natura | 55 BC |
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| 17 | Philo of Alexandria | Allegorical Expositions of the Holy Laws | 1st century |
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| 18 | Christian scripture | New Testament | ca. 50–100 AD |
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| 19 | Plutarch | Parallel Lives | 120 AD |
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| 20 | Cornelius Tacitus | Annals, From the Death of the Divine Augustus | 120 AD |
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| 21 | Valentinus | Gospel of Truth (Gnostic text) | 2nd century |
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| 22 | Marcus Aurelius | Meditations | 167 |
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| 23 | Sextus Empiricus | Outlines of Pyrrhonism | 150–210 AD |
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| 24 | Plotinus | Enneads | 3rd century |
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| 25 | Augustine of Hippo | Confessions | 400 AD |
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| 26 | Muslim scripture | Quran | 7th century |
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| 27 | Moses Maimonides | Guide for the Perplexed | 1190 |
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| 28 | Text of Judaic mysticism | Kabbalah | 12th century |
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| 29 | Thomas Aquinas | Summa Theologiae | 1266–1273 |
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| 30 | Dante Alighieri | The Divine Comedy | 1321 |
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| 31 | Desiderius Erasmus | In Praise of Folly | 1509 |
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| 32 | Niccolò Machiavelli | The Prince | 1532 |
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| 33 | Martin Luther | On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church | 1520 |
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| 34 | François Rabelais | Gargantua and Pantagruel | 1532 & 1534 |
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| 35 | John Calvin | Institutes of the Christian Religion | 1536 |
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| 36 | Nicolaus Copernicus | On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres | 1543 |
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| 37 | Michel de Montaigne | Essays | 1580 |
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| 38 | Miguel de Cervantes | Don Quixote | 1605 & 1615 |
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| 39 | Johannes Kepler | Harmony of the Worlds | 1619 |
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| 40 | Francis Bacon | Novum Organum | 1620 |
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| 41 | William Shakespeare | First Folio | 1623 |
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| 42 | Galileo Galilei | Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems | 1632 |
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| 43 | René Descartes | Discourse on Method | 1637 |
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| 44 | Thomas Hobbes | Leviathan | 1651 |
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| 45 | Gottfried Leibniz | Works | 1663–1716 |
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| 46 | Blaise Pascal | Pensées | 1670 |
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| 47 | Baruch de Spinoza | Ethics | 1677 |
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| 48 | John Bunyan | Pilgrim's Progress | 1678–1684 |
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| 49 | Isaac Newton | Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy | 1687 |
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| 50 | John Locke | Essay Concerning Human Understanding | 1689 |
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| 51 | George Berkeley | Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge | 1710, revised 1734 |
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| 52 | Giambattista Vico | The New Science | 1725, revised 1744 |
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| 53 | David Hume | A Treatise of Human Nature | 1739–1740 |
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| 54 | Denis Diderot (ed.) | Encyclopédie | 1751–1772 |
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| 55 | Samuel Johnson | A Dictionary of the English Language | 1755 |
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| 56 | Voltaire | Candide | 1759 |
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| 57 | Thomas Paine | Common Sense | 1776 |
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| 58 | Adam Smith | The Wealth of Nations | 1776 |
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| 59 | Edward Gibbon | The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire | 1776–1787 |
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| 60 | Immanuel Kant | Critique of Pure Reason | 1781, revised 1787 |
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| 61 | Jean-Jacques Rousseau | Confessions | 1781 |
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| 62 | Edmund Burke | Reflections on the Revolution in France | 1790 |
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| 63 | Mary Wollstonecraft | A Vindication of the Rights of Woman | 1792 |
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| 64 | William Godwin | An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice | 1793 |
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| 65 | Thomas Robert Malthus | An Essay on the Principle of Population | 1798, revised 1803 |
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| 66 | George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel | Phenomenology of Spirit | 1807 |
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| 67 | Arthur Schopenhauer | The World as Will and Idea | 1819 |
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| 68 | Auguste Comte | The Course in Positive Philosophy | 1830–1842 |
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| 69 | Carl von Clausewitz | On War | 1832 |
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| 70 | Søren Kierkegaard | Either/Or | 1843 |
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| 71 | Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels | Communist Manifesto | 1848 |
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| 72 | Henry David Thoreau | Civil Disobedience | 1849 |
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| 73 | Charles Darwin | The Origin of Species | 1859 |
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| 74 | John Stuart Mill | On Liberty | 1859 |
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| 75 | Herbert Spencer | First Principles | 1862 |
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| 76 | Gregor Mendel | Experiments on Plant Hybridization | 1866 |
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| 77 | Leo Tolstoy | War and Peace | 1868–1869 |
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| 78 | James Clerk Maxwell | Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism | 1873 |
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| 79 | Friedrich Nietzsche | Thus Spoke Zarathustra | 1883–1885 |
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| 80 | Sigmund Freud | The Interpretation of Dreams | 1900 |
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| 81 | William James | Pragmatism | 1908 |
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| 82 | Albert Einstein | Relativity | 1916 |
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| 83 | Vilfredo Pareto | The Mind and Society | 1916 |
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| 84 | Carl Jung | Psychological Types | 1921 |
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| 85 | Martin Buber | I and Thou | 1923 |
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| 86 | Franz Kafka | The Trial | 1925 |
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| 87 | Karl Popper | The Logic of Scientific Discovery | 1934 |
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| 88 | John Maynard Keynes | General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money | 1936 |
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| 89 | Jean-Paul Sartre | Being and Nothingness | 1943 |
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| 90 | Friedrich von Hayek | The Road to Serfdom | 1944 |
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| 91 | Simone de Beauvoir | The Second Sex | 1948 |
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| 92 | Norbert Wiener | Cybernetics | 1948, revised 1961 |
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| 93 | George Orwell | Nineteen Eighty-Four | 1949 |
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| 94 | George Gurdjieff | Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson | 1950 |
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| 95 | Ludwig Wittgenstein | Philosophical Investigations | 1953 |
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| 96 | Noam Chomsky | Syntactic Structures | 1957 |
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| 97 | Thomas Kuhn | The Structure of Scientific Revolutions | 1962, revised 1970 |
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| 98 | Betty Friedan | The Feminine Mystique | 1963 |
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| 99 | Mao Zedong
(attributed) | Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong (Little Red Book) | 1966 |
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| 100 | B. F. Skinner | Beyond Freedom and Dignity | 1971 |
