Reading for Wisdom

A very short reading list

This list highlights the most life-changing books in my 11-year study journey, in no particular order.

We've lost the path to wisdom in the modern age and we're drowning in a sea of irrelevant and disparate information. A vast library is unnecessary, only a few books are needed to lay the foundations of wisdom. These books provide the intellectual scaffolding, or bedrock, for humane, rational and sensible thought and action. They will inform all the thinking you do in life.

#1 — Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death

(Cultural Criticism)

“Americans no longer talk to each other, they entertain each other. They do not exchange ideas; they exchange images. They do not argue with propositions; they argue with good looks, celebrities, and commercials. When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience…culture-death is a clear possibility.”

#2 — Erich Fromm, The Sane Society

(Social psychology)

“The fact that millions of people share the same vices does not make these vices virtues, the fact that they share so many errors does not make the errors to be truths, and the fact that millions of people share the same forms of mental pathology does not make these people sane.”

#3 — Henry David Thoreau, Life Without Principle

(Wisdom Literature)

"If a man walk in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer; but if he spends his whole as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making earth bald before her time, he is esteemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.”

#4 — Sadhguru, Inner Engineering

(Spirituality)

“If your body and mind take instructions from you, being healthy, peaceful, and joyful is not only a possibility — it is a natural consequence.”

#5 — Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

(Wisdom literature)

“Waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be. Be one.”