The Truelove: Poet and Philosopher David Whyte on Reaching Beyond Our Limiting Beliefs About What We Deserve

“if you wanted to drown you could, but you don’t because finally after all this struggle and all these years you simply don’t want to any more, you’ve simply had enough of drowning and you wa… | Continue reading


@brainpickings.org | 2 years ago

Richard Dawkins on the Luckiness of Death

“The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia.” | Continue reading


@brainpickings.org | 2 years ago

Theodore Roosevelt on the Cowardice of Cynicism

“The poorest way to face life is to face it with a sneer. There are many men who feel a kind of twisted pride in cynicism; there are many who confine themselves to criticism of the way others… | Continue reading


@brainpickings.org | 2 years ago

The Theory of Everything (We Know So Far): The Ultimate Animated Primer on the Most Successful Model of Reality in the History of Humanity and Its Fertile Limits

How the gaps in gravity contour the next frontiers in the quest to understand the fundaments of what we are. | Continue reading


@brainpickings.org | 2 years ago

Tree Islands and Networked Resilience: Biomimicry Pioneer Janine Benyus on the Power of Reciprocity in Nature and Our Human Future

“The more stressful the environment, the more likely you are to see plants working together to ensure mutual survival.” | Continue reading


@brainpickings.org | 2 years ago

The Ship of Theseus: An Ancient Thought Experiment Exploring What Makes You You

“Which you is ‘who’? The person you are today? Five years ago? Who you’ll be in fifty years? And when is ‘am’? This week? Today? This hour? This second? And whic… | Continue reading


@brainpickings.org | 2 years ago

Rocky Mountain Flowers: The Daring Life and Art of Pioneering Plant Ecologist Edith Clements

“There seems little doubt that the application of the principles of ecology to human affairs, whether personal, national or world-wide, would go far in solving the problems that beset us.R… | Continue reading


@brainpickings.org | 2 years ago

Art as Aliveness: Willa Cather on Attention and Sensory Presence as Key to Creativity

“Art is a matter of enjoyment through the five senses. Unless you can see the beauty all around you everywhere, and enjoy it, you can never comprehend art.” | Continue reading


@brainpickings.org | 2 years ago

Can People Change? The Psychological Möbius Strip That Keeps Us from Ending Painful Relationships

Facing the logical fallacies that fuel painful emotional patterns and what it takes to break them with dignity, mindfulness, and emotional maturity. | Continue reading


@brainpickings.org | 2 years ago

Young Jane Goodall’s Exuberant Letters and Diary Entries from Africa

How the beloved scientist transformed a childhood fantasy into the rugged reality of revolutionary work. | Continue reading


@brainpickings.org | 2 years ago

Hannah Arendt on Forgiveness

“Forgiving… is the only reaction which does not merely re-act but acts anew and unexpectedly, unconditioned by the act which provoked it and therefore freeing from its consequences both… | Continue reading


@brainpickings.org | 2 years ago

How Jane Goodall Turned Her Childhood Dream into Reality: A Sweet Illustrated Story of Purpose and Deep Determination

A heartening testament to the power of undivided intention. | Continue reading


@brainpickings.org | 2 years ago

Pleasure and Spaciousness: Poet Naomi Shihab Nye’s Advice on Writing, Discipline, and the Two Driving Forces of Creativity

“Don’t start with a big idea. Start with a phrase, a line, a quote. Questions are very helpful. Begin with a few you’re carrying right now.” | Continue reading


@brainpickings.org | 2 years ago

The Handle on the Door to a New World: Poet Jane Hirshfield on the Magic and Power of Metaphor, Animated

“A metaphor is language that simultaneously creates and solves its own riddle; within that minute explosion of mind is both expansion and release… It is how the mind instructs itself in… | Continue reading


@brainpickings.org | 2 years ago

The Creative Urge: John Coltrane on Perseverance Against Rejection, the Innovator’s Mindset, and How Hardship Fuels Art

“Innovators always seek to revitalize, extend and reconstruct the status quo in their given fields… Quite often they are the rejects, outcasts, sub-citizens, etc. of the very societies … | Continue reading


@brainpickings.org | 2 years ago

Frida Kahlo's Passionate Hand-Written Love Letters to Diego Rivera

“Only one mountain can know the core of another mountain.” | Continue reading


@brainpickings.org | 2 years ago

Salvador Dalí's Paintings for Dante's “Divine Comedy” (2014)

From Heaven to Hell by way of melting faces and flying bones. | Continue reading


@brainpickings.org | 2 years ago

Perfect Flowers: Adventures in Nature’s Nonbinary Botany, with a Side of Emily Dickinson

Rewilding the landscape of possibility for the poetry of being. | Continue reading


@brainpickings.org | 2 years ago

How Memory Makes Us and Breaks Truth: The Rashomon Effect and the Science of How Memories Form and Falter in the Brain

“We are our memory… that chimerical museum of shifting shapes, that pile of broken mirrors.” | Continue reading


@brainpickings.org | 2 years ago

Trailblazing Astronomer Maria Mitchell on Science, Spirituality, and the Conquest of Truth

“We have a hunger of the mind which asks for knowledge of all around us, and the more we gain, the more is our desire.” | Continue reading


@brainpickings.org | 2 years ago

The Other Great Gertrude-and-Alice Love Story: The Life and Legacy of Pioneering Photographer and Bicyclist Alice Austen

Quiet courage and improbable redemption under the sycamore tree. | Continue reading


@brainpickings.org | 2 years ago

Whom We Love and Who We Are: José Ortega y Gasset on Love, Attention, and the Invisible Architecture of Our Being

“Love is an impulse which springs from the most profound depths of our beings, and upon reaching the visible surface of life carries with it an alluvium of shells and seaweed from the inner a… | Continue reading


@brainpickings.org | 2 years ago

Darling Baby: Artist Maira Kalman’s Painted Serenade to Attention, Aliveness, and the Vibrancy of Seeing the World with Newborn Eyes

“You will look at everything. And everything is really quite beautiful. Quite.” | Continue reading


@brainpickings.org | 2 years ago

Sylvia Plath and the Loneliness of Love

“Life is loneliness… Yes, there is joy, fulfillment and companionship — but the loneliness of the soul, in its appalling self-consciousness, is horrible and overpowering.” | Continue reading


@brainpickings.org | 2 years ago

Simone de Beauvoir on How Chance and Choice Converge to Make Us Who We Are

“My life … runs back through time and space to the very beginnings of the world and to its utmost limits. In my being I sum up the earthly inheritance and the state of the world at this… | Continue reading


@brainpickings.org | 2 years ago

Sarah Mapps Douglass’s Flowers: The First Surviving Art Signed by an African-American Woman

A rose is a rose is a revolution. | Continue reading


@brainpickings.org | 2 years ago

Probable Impossibilities: Physicist Alan Lightman on Beginnings, Endings, and What Makes Life Worth Living

How our cosmic improbability confers dignity and meaning upon our shared existence. | Continue reading


@brainpickings.org | 2 years ago

The Mirror of Enigmas: Borges, Bloy, and the Singing Blues of Understanding Ourselves

“We should invert our eyes and practice a sublime astronomy in the infinitude of our heart… If we see the Milky Way, it is because it actually exists in our souls.” | Continue reading


@brainpickings.org | 2 years ago

On Fulfillment Beyond the Limiting Notion of Work/Life Balance

“We are each a river with a particular abiding character, but we show radically different aspects of our self according to the territory through which we travel.” | Continue reading


@brainpickings.org | 2 years ago

The Ocean and the Meaning of Life

“Contemplating the teeming life of the shore, we have an uneasy sense of the communication of some universal truth that lies just beyond our grasp… the ultimate mystery of Life itself.&… | Continue reading


@brainpickings.org | 2 years ago

James Baldwin on Love, the Illusion of Choice, and the Paradox of Freedom

“Nothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom.” | Continue reading


@brainpickings.org | 2 years ago

The Conscience of Color, from Chemistry to Culture

“Within every color lies a story, and stories are the binding agent of culture… The right words can come only out of the perfect space of a place you love.” | Continue reading


@brainpickings.org | 2 years ago

How to Overcome Rejection: An Animated Survival Guide for the Aches of Love

A resaning antidote to one of the most dangerous and damaging romantic myths in our culture. | Continue reading


@brainpickings.org | 2 years ago

Matter Delights in Music, and Became Bach

“Sound is sea: pattern lapping pattern.” | Continue reading


@brainpickings.org | 2 years ago

I Measure Every Grief I Meet: Emily Dickinson on Love and Loss

“‘Tis good — the looking back on Grief.” | Continue reading


@brainpickings.org | 2 years ago

Citizen Science, the Cosmos, and the Meaning of Life: How the Comet That Might One Day Destroy Us Gives Us the Most Transcendent Celestial Spectacle

Encounters with the beautiful and the sublime in the science of “the single most dangerous object known to humanity.” | Continue reading


@brainpickings.org | 2 years ago

Thoreau on the Tonic of the Unexplored and the Value of Our Limits Transgressed

“At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable.” | Continue reading


@brainpickings.org | 2 years ago

The American Scholar: Emerson's Superb Speech on the Life of the Mind, the Art of Creative Reading, and the Building Blocks of Genius

“Character is higher than intellect. Thinking is the function. Living is the functionary… A great soul will be strong to live, as well as strong to think.” | Continue reading


@brainpickings.org | 2 years ago

How Playing Music Benefits Your Brain More than Any Other Activity

“Playing music is the brain’s equivalent of a full-body workout.” | Continue reading


@brainpickings.org | 2 years ago

The Secret of Happiness: Bronson Alcott on Gardening and Genius

“Every plant one tends he falls in love with… Only persons of perennial genius attract or recreate as the plants, and of books we may say the same, as of the magic of solitude.” | Continue reading


@brainpickings.org | 2 years ago

The Vast Wonder of the World: An Illustrated Homage to Ernest Everett Just’s Trailblazing Life and Life-Redefining Science

How a visionary turned the art of noticing into a leap of science. | Continue reading


@brainpickings.org | 2 years ago

Sylvia Plath on Living with the Darkness and Making Art from the Barely Bearable Lightness of Being

“One has to shut off that nagging part of the mind and go on without it with bravo and philosophy.” | Continue reading


@brainpickings.org | 2 years ago

The Tree House: A Tender Wordless Story by a Dutch Father-Daughter Artist Duo

An ecological symphony between the bears and the deep blue sea. | Continue reading


@brainpickings.org | 2 years ago

The Last Word Is Love: Aldous Huxley on Knowledge vs. Understanding and the Antidote to Our Existential Helplessness

“All of us are knowers, all the time; it is only occasionally and in spite of ourselves that we understand the mystery of given reality.” | Continue reading


@brainpickings.org | 2 years ago

The Shape of Music: Maurice Sendak's Insightful Forgotten Meditation on Fantasy, Feeling, and the Key to Great Storytelling

“Fantasy and feeling lie deeper than words… and both demand a more profound, more biological expression, the primitive expression of music.” | Continue reading


@brainpickings.org | 2 years ago

Between Science and Magic: How Hummingbirds Hover at the Edge of the Possible

How a tiny creature faster than the Space Shuttle balances the impossible equation of extreme fragility and superhuman strength. | Continue reading


@brainpickings.org | 2 years ago

Keith Haring on Art and Our Humanity

“The need to separate ourselves and connect ourselves to our environment (world) is a primary need of all human beings.” | Continue reading


@brainpickings.org | 2 years ago

Tracing the Roots of the Big Apple: The Mysterious Origins of the World’s Most Famous City Moniker

A working theory of grafting Eden. | Continue reading


@brainpickings.org | 2 years ago