Homer, The Iliad • Hinduism, Bhagavad-Gita •  Buddhism, Dhammapada
Plato: Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Phaedo • Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics
Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy: The Inferno
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile •  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust
Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals
Fyodor Dostoevsky, “The Grand Inquisitor” • Jean-Paul Sartre, “Existentialism”
Confucianism: The Analects, The Great Learning, The Doctrine of the Mean
Taoism: Tao Te Ching, Chuang Tzu •  Niccoló Machiavelli, The Prince
 William Shakespeare: Hamlet, Othello, King Lear • Moliere, The Misanthrope  Voltaire, Candide
Charles Dickens, Hard Times
James Madison, Federalist Paper #10 • Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America John Stuart Mill, On Liberty
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto
Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Elie Wiesel, Night •  Martin Luther King, Jr., “Letter from the Birmingham Jail” Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents •  Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway  Plato, Republic • Aristotle: Politics, Poetics
Leo Tolstoy: What Is Art?
Islamic Storytelling, The Arabian Nights
Ghanaian Folklore, “Why We Tell Stories About Spider”
Murasaki Shikibu, The Tale of Genji
Miguel de Cervantes, The Adventures of Don Quixote
William Wordsworth: Preface to Lyrical Ballads, The Prelude
Percy Bysshe Shelley, “A Defense of Poetry” • Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary  
Théophile Gautier, Preface to Mademoiselle de Maupin
Walter Pater, Conclusion to The Renaissance
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray •  Thomas Mann, Death in Venice
Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of the Cholera