Philosophy
Ethics, metaphysics, epistemology, political philosophy and the practical wisdom traditions including Stoicism, aphorism and the examined life. Read by people asking how to think and how to live rather than what to do on Monday.
582 books
Books 582
T1 Meditations
Marcus Aurelius · 1626 · Stoic notebooks on self-command and what is within your control
Ibn Khaldun · 1858 · Fourteenth-century theory of dynastic cycles, taxation and the rise of states
Michel de Montaigne · 1958 · Montaigne on self-knowledge and the unreliability of one's own judgment
Douglas R. Hofstadter · 1979 · Self-reference and strange loops across mathematics, art and music
Neil Postman · 1985 · Television as a medium that reshapes public discourse into entertainment
T1 Sapiens
Yuval Noah Harari · 2011 · Big history of money, trade and the shared fictions that organise markets
Andrew WilkinsonBill GatesMohnish PabraiNat EliasonNaval RavikantShane ParrishVinod KhoslaAlfred LinAli AbdaalAna FabregaAnthony PomplianoBrett AdcockChangpeng ZhaoDaniel EkDaniel PetreDemis HassabisJames CameronJulian ShapiroJulie ZhuoKeith RaboisLi LuMarc AndreessenMark ZuckerbergMatt MullenwegMelinda GatesNiki ScevakNir EyalPatrick O'ShaughnessyPaul BassatPeter AttiaRaoul PalRay DalioReid HoffmanRichard BransonRyan SheaSahil LavingiaScott FarquharThe Rational WalkTrevor NcubeZoë Foster Blake
T1 Being Mortal
Atul Gawande · 2014 · Where end-of-life spending goes, and why that demand is inelastic.
Nick Bostrom · 2014 · The argument that motivated OpenAI's founding mission.
Stuart Russell · 2019 · Control reframed as uncertainty about human objectives.
Ludwig Wittgenstein · 1921 · The limits of language and what can be said precisely
Joseph Campbell · 1949 · The monomyth; why the same story shape persuades across cultures
Will Durant, Ariel Durant · 1968 · A century of history compressed into recurring patterns and rates
Robert M. Pirsig · 1974 · Philosophical inquiry into quality and how to reason about systems
Rene Girard · 1978 · Girard's mimetic theory in full; desire copied from other people
James P. Carse · 1986 · Games played to win against games played to continue play
Matt Ridley · 1996 · Cooperation as an evolved strategy; reciprocity and the prisoner's dilemma
David Deutsch · 1997 · Four strands of explanation; knowledge as the engine of progress
T2 Consilience
Edward O. Wilson · 1998 · Wilson's argument for the unity of knowledge across disciplines
John Kay, Mervyn King · 2020 · The case against forcing non-probabilistic problems into probability.
Brian Christian · 2020 · The technical safety agenda OpenAI claims to serve.
Francis Bacon · 1627 · Bacon's utopia of organised research; science as an institution
James Burnham · 1943 · Elite theory: who actually rules, and why stated aims mislead
Rene Girard · 1963 · Girard reading Dostoevsky; mimetic rivalry and resentment
Joseph Campbell, Bill Moyers · 1988 · Campbell on the recurring stories cultures tell themselves
T3 Mastery
George Leonard · 1991 · The plateau and long practice; mastery as a delayed reward
Richard Dawkins · 1995 · Genes as a river of digital information; a short Dawkins primer
Jared Diamond · 1997 · Diamond's central question — why did some civilizations come to dominate others over 10,000 years? — is precisely the kind of question that requires long-term thinking to even ask. The answer, rooted in geography and biology rather than culture or intelligence, is a model for how to reason about slow causes and fast effects.
Umberto Eco · 1997 · Eco on how we categorise the world and where categories fail
Stewart Brand · 1999 · Brand's book is the founding document of institutional long-term thinking. It proposes a 10,000-year clock as a forcing function for civilizational patience, and along the way develops the concept of pace layers — the idea that different structures (fashion, commerce, governance, culture, nature) change at radically different speeds, and that confusing these speeds is the root of most short-termism.
T3 Nonzero
Robert Wright · 2000 · History read as an expanding series of non-zero-sum games
Anthony Gottlieb · 2000 · History of Western philosophy from the Greeks to the Renaissance
T3 Invariances
Robert Nozick · 2001 · Nozick on objectivity and what stays invariant across perspectives
James Franklin · 2001 · How evidence and probability were reasoned about before formal statistics
Jon Elster · 2007 · Elster on mechanisms rather than laws in the social sciences
Donella H. Meadows · 2008 · Meadows wrote this before systems thinking became a popular phrase, and it remains the clearest account of why short-term interventions in complex systems so often backfire. The chapter on leverage points is the conceptual core of what long-term thinking actually requires from decision-makers.
William B. Irvine · 2009 · Modern Stoicism; desire management and negative visualisation
Emanuel Derman · 2011 · A quant on confusing models with reality, in finance and life
John Brockman · 2012 · Short essays on the scientific concepts most worth adopting
Guy Spier · 2014 · Spier on the psychology and habits behind durable value investing.
Marcelo Gleiser · 2014 · The limits of scientific knowledge and what cannot be measured
Chuck Klosterman · 2016 · How present certainties will look to the future; outside view applied
Ryan Holiday · 2019
William MacAskill · 2022 · MacAskill's longtermist argument, grounded in effective altruism, is the most rigorous philosophical case for prioritizing future people. His core claim — that if the future contains vast numbers of people, influencing its trajectory matters more than almost anything we might do for the present — is informed by Derek Parfit's work on personal identity and is the most demanding version of the long-term thinking argument.
Oliver Burkeman · Burkeman's book on finitude is the necessary counterweight to grandiose civilizational thinking. Four thousand weeks is approximately an 80-year life, and Burkeman's argument — that productivity systems typically function as denial mechanisms against this fact — forces the question of how a mortal agent ought to orient toward long-term causes. The tension between personal finitude and multigenerational obligation is never fully resolved here, which is exactly right.
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Richard Dawkins · Dawkins narrates the whole of evolutionary history as a pilgrimage backward in time, meeting ancestors at each branching point. The cumulative effect is a felt sense of deep time that no abstract statement about 'billions of years' can produce. Reading this first recalibrates everything that follows.
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Roman Krznaric · Krznaric surveys six ways of thinking that orient people toward longer horizons — from the cathedral builders of the medieval period to Iroquois seven-generation decision-making. His concept of 'acorn brain' versus 'marshmallow brain' is a useful diagnostic for why institutions favor short-term reward even when long-term thinking is available.
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David Wallace-Wells · Wallace-Wells's inventory of worst-case climate projections is included here not as a climate book but as a case study in what happens when institutions consistently discount long-term risk. The scenarios he describes are already visible in the data; they were predictable decades ago. This is what the failure of long-term thinking looks like from inside it.
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George Horace Lorimer · 1902
M.K. Gandhi · 1927
Ayn Rand · 1936
Viktor E. Frankl · 1968
Frank MartinMohnish PabraiNat EliasonRyan HolidayAlex and BooksAntonio García MartínezBrené BrownBryan JohnsonCodie SanchezDavid Heinemeier HanssonEv WilliamsJames AltucherJason CalacanisJulie StevanjaMaria PopovaNathan MurphyNaval RavikantSahil BloomSam AltmanShane ParrishSimon SinekSteph SmithSuperbook reading listsTerrance McArthurThe Rational WalkTim FerrissTom BilyeuTony Robbins
Shunryu Suzuki · 1970
John Murray Cuddihy · 1974
M. Scott Peck · 1978
Christopher Alexander · 1979
George Lakoff · 1980
John Allen Paulos · 1985 · Analytic philosophy and logic presented through humour
Thomas Sowell · 1987
Robert Wright · 1988 · Information theory as a unifying idea across three scientists' work
Robert Grudin · 1990
Menahem Mendel Schneersohn · 1995
Robin Sharma · 1996
Rick Warren · 1997
Richard P. Feynman · 1998
George Soros · 2000 · Open Library lists the short title "Open society".
Randy Komisar · 2000
L.J. Rittenhouse · 2002
Keith Stanovich · 2004
Gordon Livingston · 2004
Gerald M. Edelman · 2004
Morrie Schwartz · 2005
Don Frick, Larry C. Spears · 2007
Nassim Nicholas Taleb · 2007 · Incerto volume 2; OL records first publish year as 2005
Michael A. Singer · 2007
John C. Bogle · 2008
Gurcharan Das · 2009
Nassim Nicholas Taleb · 2010 · Incerto volume 3; aphorisms
Elie Ayache · 2010 · Philosophical treatment of contingency and the practice of option trading
George Soros · 2010 · Open Library lists the short title "The Soros Lectures".
William J. Dawson · 2011 · Edwardian essay on living deliberately below your means
Clayton Christensen, James Allworth, Karen Dillon · with James Allworth, Karen Dillon · 2012 · Open Library unreachable this run; title not machine-verified.
Ali Almossawi · 2013 · Short illustrated catalogue of the common logical fallacies
Daniel C. Dennett · 2013 · Dennett's toolkit of thought experiments for reasoning carefully
David Brooks · 2015
Daniel C. Dennett · 2017
David Clark · 2017 · Quotation collection with commentary; thin, but the quotes are sourced.
Christopher Mayer · 2018 · Subtitled A Guide to Clear Thinking About Wall Street, Investing, and Life.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb · 2018 · Incerto volume 5; OL records first publish year as 2017
Fred Kofman · 2018 · Leadership treated as the creation of meaning inside organisations
Donald Robertson · 2019
George Soros · 2019 · Published in the UK as In Defence of Open Society.
Tom Chivers · 2019 · The rationalist milieu behind OpenAI's founders and its board fight.
Bill Perkins · 2020
Martha Beck · 2021
Miyamoto Musashi · 2025
Marc Andreessen · 2025 · Standalone edition of the 2023 a16z essay; Andreessen has written no conventional book
Jim Rogers
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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Sri Aurobindo Ashram
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James P. Carse
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Goldian Vanden Broeck
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Parker J. Palmer
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The Earl Of Chesterfield
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Alan Lightman
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Ichiro Kishimi, Fumitake Koga
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Marcus Aurelius, David Hicks
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Heinrich Zimmer, Joseph Campbell (ed.)
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Julian Jaynes
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Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh
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Kenneth O. Stanley, Joel Lehman
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