Tao Te Ching

Eighty-one short chapters, many only a few lines long, about the Tao, the Way that cannot be named, and about the virtue of following it. The book praises softness over hardness, as water wears away stone, emptiness over fullness, as a bowl is useful for the space inside it, and doing nothing against the grain of things over force and cleverness. The best ruler, it says, governs so lightly that the people hardly know he is there, and the wise person does not boast and so is not overthrown.

The text is traditionally credited to Lao Tzu, a sage of the sixth century BC, and it is the founding book of Taoism and one of the most translated books in the world. This is James Legge's Victorian translation, read by Eric S. Piotrowski in about an hour and a half.