I waffled on choosing 100-250 initially, thinking similarly as you for authors like Shakespeare, Freud, Nietzsche, etc. But then I kind of thought, for most pe

I waffled on choosing 100-250 initially, thinking similarly as you for authors like Shakespeare, Freud, Nietzsche, etc. But then I kind of thought, for most people, that is probably overkill. If you stick with just one text from each great author, 50 is still a huge variety relative I think to what was available to people in the past. More is great, but not necessary: there are plenty of other sources of depth in life beyond texts, and text doesn't work well for everyone either.