Kinship: Ursula K. Le Guin’s Love Poem to Trees, the Interleaving of Life and Death, and the Eternal Flame of Being

A lyric reminder that “the word for world is forest” and the feeling of forest is love. | Continue reading


@brainpickings.org | 2 years ago

How (Not) to Love: Breaking Our Patterns to Unbreak Our Hearts, or, Chekhov’s Insight into the Most Disquieting and Liberating Truth about Love

“We want to believe that love is singular and exclusive, and it unnerves us to think that it might actually be renewable…” | Continue reading


@brainpickings.org | 2 years ago

When Debate Is Futile: Bertrand Russell's Remarkable Response to a Fascist's Provocation

“The emotional universes we inhabit are so distinct, and in deepest ways opposed, that nothing fruitful or sincere could ever emerge from association between us.” | Continue reading


@brainpickings.org | 2 years ago

The Century-Old Field Guide to Wonder and the Forgotten Woman Who Laid the Groundwork for the Youth Climate Action Movement

“All things seem possible in nature; yet this seeming is always guarded by the eager quest of what IS true. Perhaps half the falsehood in the world is due to lack of power to detect the truth… | Continue reading


@brainpickings.org | 2 years ago

The Art of Solitude: Buddhist Scholar and Teacher Stephen Batchelor on Contemplative Practice and Creativity

“Here lies the paradox of solitude. Look long and hard enough at yourself in isolation and suddenly you will see the rest of humanity staring back.” | Continue reading


@brainpickings.org | 2 years ago

Alain de Botton on the Myth of Normalcy and the Importance of Breakdowns

“Crisis… is an attempt to dislodge us from a toxic status quo and constitutes an insistent call to rebuild our lives on a more authentic and sincere basis.” | Continue reading


@brainpickings.org | 2 years ago

The Beauty of the Overlooked: Philip Henry Gosse’s Stunning 19th-Century Illustrations of Coastal Creatures and Reflections on the Delicate Kinship of Life

“These objects are, it is true, among the humblest of creatures that are endowed with organic life… Here we catch the first kindling of that spark, which glows into so noble a flame in … | Continue reading


@brainpickings.org | 2 years ago

Go the Way Your Blood Beats: James Baldwin on Love, the Trap of Labels, and His Liberating Advice on Coming Out

“Loving anybody and being loved by anybody is a tremendous danger, a tremendous responsibility.” | Continue reading


@brainpickings.org | 2 years ago

The Three Buddhist Steps to Repairing Relationships

“The intention of deep listening and loving speech is to restore communication, because once communication is restored, everything is possible.” | Continue reading


@brainpickings.org | 2 years ago

Funeral March for the First Cosmonaut: Artist, Poet, and Philosopher Etel Adnan’s Stunning Painted Poem About Life, Death, Loneliness, and Our Cosmic Redemption

“In the beginning was the white page. In the beginning was the Sufi in orbit… In the beginning was color. In the beginning was music.” | Continue reading


@brainpickings.org | 2 years ago

The Three Types of People Powering Change: Dr. King’s Lost Massey Lectures on Youth and Social Action

“There has always been a force struggling to respect higher values. None of the current evils rose without resistance, nor have they persisted without opposition.” | Continue reading


@brainpickings.org | 2 years ago

Broken Tulips: How a Virus Gave the World’s Most Prized Flower Its Beauty

An epochal intersection of art and science, ecology and culture, psychology and microbiology. | Continue reading


@brainpickings.org | 2 years ago

A Process for the Transfer of Energy and Feeling: George Saunders on the Key to Great Storytelling

“What a story is ‘about’ is to be found in the curiosity it creates in us, which is a form of caring.” | Continue reading


@brainpickings.org | 2 years ago

Maya Angelou on Freedom: A 1973 Conversation with Bill Moyers

“You only are free when you realize you belong no place — you belong every place — no place at all.” | Continue reading


@brainpickings.org | 2 years ago

September 28, 1951: Alan Turing, the World’s First Digital Music, and the Poetry of Possibility

A hoot, a hummingbird, and an electronic hymn for the modern world. | Continue reading


@brainpickings.org | 2 years ago

It from Bit: John Archibald Wheeler

“All things physical are information-theoretic in origin and this is a participatory universe… Observer-participancy gives rise to information.” | Continue reading


@brainpickings.org | 2 years ago

Love, Death, and Whitman: Poet Mark Doty on the Paradox of Desire and the Courage to Love Against the Certitude of Loss

“Isn’t the flesh a way to drink of the fountain of otherhood, a way to taste the not-I, a way to blur the edges and thus feel the fact of them?… You need to both remember where love lea… | Continue reading


@brainpickings.org | 2 years ago

Place, Personhood, and the Hippocampus: The Fascinating Science of Magnetism, Autonoeic Consciousness, and What Makes Us Who We Are

“Often the places we grow up in… influence how we perceive and conceptualize the world, give us metaphors to live by, and shape the purpose that drives us.” | Continue reading


@brainpickings.org | 2 years ago

Between Restlessness and Rapture: Autumn and the Sensual Urgency of Aliveness

A wildlife ecologist’s serenade to the season that makes you “want to linger long enough to hear every sound and look far enough to see into forever.” | Continue reading


@brainpickings.org | 2 years ago

The Good Luck of Your Bad Luck: Marcus Aurelius on the Stoic Strategy for Weathering Life’s Waves and Turning Suffering into Strength

“What happened could have happened to anyone, but not everyone could have carried on.” | Continue reading


@brainpickings.org | 2 years ago

The Gifted Listener: Composer Aaron Copland on Honing Your Talent for Listening to Music

“There are few pleasures in art greater than the secure sense that one can recognize beauty when one comes upon it… Recognizing the beautiful in an abstract art like music partakes somewhat o… | Continue reading


@brainpickings.org | 2 years ago

Blue Floats Away: A Tender Illustrated Parable About the Science of Earth’s Water Cycle and the Poetics of Our Capacity for Transformation

In praise of our unfathomed capacity to experience beautiful new things beyond our habitual ideas of the possible. | Continue reading


@brainpickings.org | 2 years ago

The Unfinished Story of the World: Richard Powers’s Advice on Life and the Antidote to Cynicism

“This fluke, single, huge, cross-indexed, thermodynamic experiment of a story that the world has been inventing to tell itself at bedtime is still in embryo. It’s not even the outline o… | Continue reading


@brainpickings.org | 2 years ago

Bridging the Island Universes of Our Experience: Aldous Huxley on Making Sense of Ourselves and Each Other

“To see ourselves as others see us is a most salutary gift. Hardly less important is the capacity to see others as they see themselves.” | Continue reading


@brainpickings.org | 2 years ago

The Blue Horses of Our Destiny: Artist Franz Marc, the Wisdom of Animals, and the Fight of Beauty Against Brutality

Tragedy and transcendence in the search for the spiritual in nature. | Continue reading


@brainpickings.org | 2 years ago

The Jazz of Trees: The Fascinating Science of Improvisation, Reiteration, and Phoenix Regeneration

“Potentially, every tree is immortal.” | Continue reading


@brainpickings.org | 2 years ago

How to Feel More Alive Each Day and Night: A Cosmic Nightwalk with Derek Jarman

“Here man has invented the heavens but the moon, not to be usurped, shines sickle bright, gathering our souls.” | Continue reading


@brainpickings.org | 2 years ago

Chekhov on the Ultimate Task of Art and How (Not) to Be a Writer

On solving problems vs. posing questions. | Continue reading


@brainpickings.org | 2 years ago

The Old Man and The Sea, Finger-Painted and Animated on Glass

Astounding Oscar-winning adaptation of the Hemingway classic by Russian animator Aleksandr Petrov, made of 29,000 images finger-painted with pastels on glass. | Continue reading


@brainpickings.org | 2 years ago

Einstein’s Dreams: Physicist Alan Lightman’s Poetic Exploration of Time and the Antidote to the Anxiety of Aliveness

“A life in the past cannot be shared with the present. Each person who gets stuck in time gets stuck alone.” | Continue reading


@brainpickings.org | 2 years ago

Bob Dylan on Emotion, Vulnerability as the Price of Integrity, and Music as an Instrument of Truth

“You must be vulnerable to be sensitive to reality. And to me being vulnerable is just another way of saying that one has nothing more to lose.” | Continue reading


@brainpickings.org | 2 years ago

What Is a River: An Illustrated Reverence Between the Encyclopedic and the Poetic

A painted landscape of fact and feeling along the flow of existence. | Continue reading


@brainpickings.org | 2 years ago

Leonard Bernstein on Cynicism, Instant Gratification, and Why Paying Attention Is a Countercultural Act of Courage and Resistance

“There is so much inherent goodness in people that if they aren’t inhibited by traumas and are given half a chance, it shines through.” | Continue reading


@brainpickings.org | 2 years ago

Mary’s Room: An Animated Adaptation of the Classic Thought Experiment Probing the Limits of Knowledge and the Mystery of Consciousness

The gasp beyond fact, contouring the central question of what it is like to be you. | Continue reading


@brainpickings.org | 2 years ago

A New Refutation of Time: Borges on the Most Paradoxical Dimension of Existence

“Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am t… | Continue reading


@brainpickings.org | 2 years ago

Hermann Hesse on Little Joys (2017)

“The high value put upon every minute of time, the idea of hurry-hurry as the most important objective of living, is unquestionably the most dangerous enemy of joy.” | Continue reading


@brainpickings.org | 2 years ago

Music and the Mystery of Aliveness

“We are a music-making species — always have been, always will be — and music’s capacity to explore, express and address what it is to be human remains one of our greatest communal gifts.R… | Continue reading


@brainpickings.org | 2 years ago

Recovering the Wonder of Flight: “Little Prince” Author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry on Finding the Miraculous in the Mechanical

“In anything at all, perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away, when a body has been stripped down to its n… | Continue reading


@brainpickings.org | 2 years ago

How Panpsychism and Its Fault Lines Shade in the Ongoing Mystery of Consciousness

“We’ve barely begun to understand our place in the cosmos. As we continue to look out from our planet and contemplate the nature of reality, we should remember that there is a mystery right h… | Continue reading


@brainpickings.org | 2 years ago

Bukowski's Letter of Gratitude to the Man Who Helped Him Quit His Soul-Sucking Job and Become a Full-Time Writer

“To not have entirely wasted one’s life seems to be a worthy accomplishment, if only for myself.” | Continue reading


@brainpickings.org | 2 years ago

Trees, Whales, and Our Digital Future: George Dyson on Nature, Human Nature, and the Relationship Between Our Minds and Our Machines

“Nature’s answer to those who seek to control nature through programmable machines is to allow us to build systems whose nature is beyond programmable control.” | Continue reading


@brainpickings.org | 2 years ago

The Unbearable Lightness of Being Opaque to Ourselves: Milan Kundera on Writing and the Key to Great Storytelling

A torch for traversing “the territory where no one possesses the truth… but where everyone has the right to be understood.” | Continue reading


@brainpickings.org | 2 years ago

Water as a Portal to Transcendence

“The sea holds an abundance of comfort and inspiration and danger, all that a person needs in order to rise to the full largesse of beauty… If you allow this beauty to become a blank, i… | Continue reading


@brainpickings.org | 2 years ago

How to Befriend the Universe: Philosopher and Comedian Emily Levine on the Art of Meeting Reality on Its Own Terms

From Newton to quantum physics to Hannah Arendt, a mind-bending, heart-opening invitation to welcome nature exactly as it is and ourselves exactly as we are. | Continue reading


@brainpickings.org | 2 years ago

The Optimism of the Oyster

From the rudiments of consciousness to the redemptions of conservation, with a side of existential reckoning. | Continue reading


@brainpickings.org | 2 years ago

The Unity of the Universe: Nobel-Winning Physicist Steven Weinberg on Simplicity and Complexity, Science and Religion, and the Mother of All Questions

“We all bear conflicting needs within us. We want both, simplicity and abundance.” | Continue reading


@brainpickings.org | 2 years ago

José Ortega y Gasset on the True Meaning and Measure of Intelligence

“Intelligence asserts itself above all not in art, nor in science, but in intuition of life.” | Continue reading


@brainpickings.org | 2 years ago

Man’s Search for Meaning

“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” | Continue reading


@brainpickings.org | 2 years ago