Articles by Maria Popova
We found 313 results.
Consciousness, Artificial Intelligence, and Our Search for Meaning: Oliver Sacks on ChatGPT, 30 Years before ChatGPT
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
22 May 2023
“We read excitedly of the latest chemical, computational, or quantum theory of mind, and then ask, ‘Is that all there is to it?’”
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The Heart of Matter: Pierre Teilhard de Chardin on Bridging the Scientific and the Sacred
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
15 May 2023
“Blessed be you, mighty matter, irresistible march of evolution, reality ever new-born; you who, by constantly shattering our mental categories, force us to go ever further and further in our pursuit of the truth.”
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Dostoyevsky on Animal Rights and the Deepest Meaning of Human Love
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
1 May 2023
“Treasure this ecstasy; however absurd people may think it.”
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Lichens and the Meaning of Life
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
17 Apr 2023
We Are Lichens on a Grand Scale
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An Introvert’s Field Guide to Friendship: Thoreau on the Challenges and Rewards of the Art of Connection
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
17 Apr 2023
“We only need to be as true to others as we are to ourselves that there may be ground enough for friendship.”
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How to Bear Your Loneliness: Grounding Wisdom from the Great Buddhist Teacher Pema Chödrön
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
10 Apr 2023
“We are cheating ourselves when we run away from the ambiguity of loneliness.”
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2,000 Years of Kindness
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
3 Apr 2023
From Marcus Aurelius to Einstein, poets and philosophers on the deepest wellspring of our humanity.
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God, Human, Animal, Machine: Consciousness and Our Search for Meaning in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
3 Apr 2023
An inquiry into the eternal enchantment of why the world exists.
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The Transcendent Brain: The Poetic Physicist Alan Lightman on Spirituality for the Science-Spirited
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
27 Mar 2023
A largehearted invitation to “stand on the precipice between the known and the unknown, without fear, without anxiety, but instead with awe and wonder at this strange and beautiful cosmos we find ourselves in.”
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How to Survive Hopelessness
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
27 Mar 2023
“You can expect good and bad luck, but good or bad judgment is your prerogative.”
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Bertrand Russell on the Secret of Happiness
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
20 Mar 2023
“Let your interests be as wide as possible, and let your reactions to the things and persons that interest you be as far as possible friendly rather than hostile.”
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Against the Cult of Originality: Emerson on the True Nature of Genius
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
13 Mar 2023
The best things in life we don’t choose — they choose us. A great love, a great calling, a great illumination — they happen unto us, like light falling upon that which is lit. We have given a name to these unbidden greatnesses — genius, from the Latin for “spirit,” denoting the spirit of a universe we can only submit to but cannot govern.
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The Vital Difference between Work and Labor: Lewis Hyde on Sustaining the Creative Spirit
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
6 Mar 2023
“The gifts of the inner world must be accepted as gifts in the outer world if they are to retain their vitality.”
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How to Be with Each Other’s Suffering: Elie Wiesel on the Antidote to Our Paralysis in the Face of World-Overwhelm
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
27 Feb 2023
“I believe if people talk, and they talk sincerely, with the same respect that one owes to a close friend or to God, something will come out of that, something good. I would call it presence.”
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How to Be Less Harsh with Yourself (and Others): Ram Dass on the Spiritual Lessons of Trees
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
20 Feb 2023
A simple perspective shift that reorients the roots of being. Hermann Hesse believed that trees are our greatest spiritual teachers. Walt Whitman cherished them as paragons of authenticity amid a world of mere appearances.
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Rising Strong: Brené Brown on the Physics of Vulnerability and What Resilient People Have in Common
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
13 Feb 2023
“If we are brave enough often enough, we will fall; this is the physics of vulnerability.”
→ read full articleA Winter Walk with Thoreau: The Transcendentalist Way of Finding Inner Warmth in the Cold Season
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
6 Feb 2023
“Take long walks in stormy weather or through deep snows in the fields and woods, if you would keep your spirits up. Deal with brute nature. Be cold and hungry and weary.”
→ read full articleA Responsibility to Wonder: Pioneering Neuroscientist Charles Scott Sherrington on the Spirituality of Nature
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
30 Jan 2023
“We have, because human, an inalienable prerogative of responsibility which we cannot devolve…not… even upon the stars. We can share it only with each other.”
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The Tragic Miracle of Consciousness: John Steinbeck on the True Meaning and Purpose of Hope
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
23 Jan 2023
“Hope is a diagnostic human trait and this simple cortex symptom seems to be a prime factor in our inspection of our universe.”
→ read full articleThe Seamstress Who Solved the Ancient Mystery of the Argonaut, Pioneered the Aquarium, and Laid the Groundwork for the Study of Octopus Intelligence
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
9 Jan 2023
But after repeating her experiment for five years and obtaining the same result over and over, Jeanne Villepreux-Power demonstrated that the octopus is indeed this planet’s patron saint of the possible.
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The Four Desires Driving All Human Behavior: Bertrand Russell’s Magnificent Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
2 Jan 2023
Bertrand Russell (May 18, 1872–February 2, 1970) endures as one of humanity’s most lucid and luminous minds — an oracle of timeless wisdom on everything.
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The Four Buddhist Mantras for Turning Fear into Love–>Thich Nhat Hanh
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
2 Jan 2023
“When you love someone, the best thing you can offer that person is your presence.”
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The Poetic Science of the Aurora Borealis
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
19 Dec 2022
“And now commenced a display which baffles all description.”
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A Stoic’s Key to Peace of Mind: Seneca on the Antidote to Anxiety
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
5 Dec 2022
“There are more things … likely to frighten us than there are to crush us; we suffer more often in imagination than in reality. The truth is, we know so little about life, we don’t really know what the good news is and what the bad news is.” — Kurt Vonnegut
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Ursula K. Le Guin on Suffering and Getting to the Other Side of Pain
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
21 Nov 2022
“All you have is what you are, and what you give.”
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Trial, Triumph, and the Art of the Possible: The Remarkable Story behind Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy”
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
14 Nov 2022
A hymn of rage, a hymn of redemption, and a timeless love letter to the possible.
→ read full article16 Life-Learnings from 16 Years of The Marginalian
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
24 Oct 2022
23 Oct 2022 – The Marginalian was born as a plain-text newsletter to seven friends on October 23, 2006, under the outgrown name Brain Pickings. Reflections on keeping the soul intact and alive and worthy of itself.
→ read full articleThe Everlasting Wonder of Being: How a Cold Cosmos Kindles the Glow of Consciousness
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
3 Oct 2022
How we went from quanta packages to the laughter of children on a summer afternoon.
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The Mirror of Enigmas: Chance, the Universe, and the Fragile Loveliness of Knowing Who We Are
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
26 Sep 2022
“There is no human being on earth capable of declaring with certitude who he is.” It takes a great sobriety of spirit to know your own depths — and your limits. It takes a special grandeur of spirit to know the limits of your self-knowledge. (Jorge Luis Borges)
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Keith Haring on Our Resistance to Change, the Dangers of Certainty, and the Root of Creativity
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
19 Sep 2022
“To be a victim of change is to ignore its existence. It is almost banal to say so yet it needs to be stressed continually: all is creation, all is change, all is flux, all is metamorphosis,” — Henry Miller
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The Art of Choosing Love over Not-Love: Rumi’s Antidote to Our Human Tragedy
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
12 Sep 2022
“You’ll long for me when I’m gone… You’ll kiss the headstone of my grave… Kiss my face instead!”
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How to Keep Life from Becoming a Parody of Itself: Simone de Beauvoir on the Art of Growing Older
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
22 Aug 2022
“In old age we should wish still to have passions strong enough to prevent us turning in on ourselves.”
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Life and Death and More Life: Leo Tolstoy on Science, Spirituality, and Our Search for Meaning
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
15 Aug 2022
“A caterpillar sees itself shrivel up, but doesn’t see the butterfly which flies out of it.” “How can a creature who will certainly die have an understanding of things that will exist forever?”
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The Bittersweet Story of the Real-Life Peaceful Bull Who Inspired Munro Leaf and Robert Lawson’s Ferdinand
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
1 Aug 2022
A journey to the abyss between the real world and the ideal world, and a romp across our mightiest bridge between the two.
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Herman Melville’s Passionate, Beautiful, Heartbreaking Love Letters to Nathaniel Hawthorne
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
20 Jun 2022
“Your heart beat in my ribs and mine in yours, and both in God’s… The divine magnet is in you, and my magnet responds.”
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Trial, Triumph, and the Art of the Possible: The Remarkable Story behind Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy”
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
6 Jun 2022
A hymn of rage, a hymn of redemption, and a timeless love letter to the possible.
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The Age of the Possible
Maria Popova – TRANSCEND Media Service,
6 Jun 2022
There,
at the bottom of being,
where the water that makes
this planet a world
is the color of spacetime
How to Face the Centuries with Confidence: The Mystery of the World’s Most Majestic Tree
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
16 May 2022
Some great poetic truth quickens as you stand beneath one of the world’s oldest trees–older than your most distant known ancestor, your country, your country’s religion: 3,266 years old. “The calm deposition of the rings… has gone on millimeter by millimeter for millennium after millennium — advancing ripples in the tide of time.”
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The Russian Prince Turned Anarchist and Pioneering Scientist Peter Kropotkin’s Advice to the Young
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
2 May 2022
The Art of Putting Your Talent in the Service of the World – “Courage, devotion, the spirit of sacrifice, are as contagious as cowardice, submission, and panic.”
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Neither Victims nor Executioners: Albert Camus on the Antidote to Violence
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
11 Apr 2022
“If he who bases his hopes on human nature is a fool, he who gives up in the face of circumstances is a coward.”
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Maya Angelou (4 Apr 1928 – 28 May 2014): Identity and the Meaning of Life
Maria Popova | Brain Pickings – TRANSCEND Media Service,
4 Apr 2022
The light of the world has grown a little dimmer with the loss of the phenomenal Maya Angelou, but her legacy endures as a luminous beacon of strength, courage, and spiritual beauty.
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Escaping the Trap of Efficiency: The Counterintuitive Antidote to the Time-Anxiety That Haunts and Hampers Our Search for Meaning
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
21 Mar 2022
“Productivity is a trap. Becoming more efficient just makes you more rushed, and trying to clear the decks simply makes them fill up again faster… Since finitude defines our lives… living a truly authentic life — becoming fully human — means facing up to that fact.”
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How the Great Zen Master and Peace Activist Thich Nhat Hanh Found Himself and Lost His Self in a Library Epiphany
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
14 Mar 2022
“To live, we must die every instant. We must perish again and again in the storms that make life possible.”
→ read full articleThe Four Buddhist Mantras for Turning Fear into Love
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
7 Mar 2022
“When you love someone, the best thing you can offer that person is your presence.”
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The Great Humanistic Philosopher and Psychologist Erich Fromm on Our Human Fragility as the Key to Our Survival and Our Sanity
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
28 Feb 2022
An Antidote to Helplessness and Disorientation – “Only through full awareness of the danger to life can this potential be mobilized for action capable of bringing about drastic changes in our way of organizing society.”
→ read full articleWhat Happens When We Die
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
21 Feb 2022
“How can a creature who will certainly die have an understanding of things that will exist forever?”
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Nobel-Winning Physicist Wolfgang Pauli on Science, Spirit, and Our Search for Meaning
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
7 Feb 2022
“It is only a narrow passage of truth (no matter whether scientific or other truth) that passes between the Scylla of a blue fog of mysticism and the Charybdis of a sterile rationalism. This will always be full of pitfalls and one can fall down on both sides.”
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Dreams, Consciousness, and the Nature of the Universe
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
31 Jan 2022
“Perhaps dreams are an arena that can enable supracognitive powers to perform calculations and perceptions of reality that may be incomprehensible in our wake state.”
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James Baldwin on Resisting the Mindless Majority, Not Running from Uncomfortable Realities, and What It Really Means to Grow Up
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
17 Jan 2022
“We ought to try, by the example of our own lives, to prove that life is love and wonder and that that nation is doomed which penalizes those of its citizens who recognize and rejoice in this fact.”
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Carl Jung on How to Live and the Origin of “Do the Next Right Thing”
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
10 Jan 2022
“There is no pit you cannot climb out of provided you make the right effort at the right place… do the next thing with diligence and devotion.”
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Music, the Neural Harmonics of Emotion, and How Love Restrings the Brain
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
3 Jan 2022
“Who we are and who we become depends, in part, on whom we love.”
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May Sarton on the Cure for Despair and Why Solitude Is the Seedbed of Self-Discovery
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
27 Dec 2021
“Sometimes one has simply to endure a period of depression for what it may hold of illumination if one can live through it, attentive to what it exposes or demands.”
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Oliver Sacks on Gratitude, the Measure of Living, and the Dignity of Dying
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
6 Dec 2021
“I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.”
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What Makes You Makes the Universe: Nobel Laureate Erwin Schrödinger on Quantum Physics, Vedanta, and the Ongoing Mystery of Consciousness
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
22 Nov 2021
“This life of yours which you are living is not merely a piece of the entire existence, but is in a certain sense the whole.”
→ read full articleEvery Loss Reveals What We Are Made of: Blue Bananas, Why Leaves Change Color, and the Ongoing Mystery of Chlorophyll
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
8 Nov 2021
“We reach forth and strain every nerve, but we seize only a bit of the curtain that hides the infinite from us.” Autumn is the season of ambivalence and reconciliation, soft-carpeted training ground for the dissolution that awaits us all, low-lit chamber for hearing more intimately the syncopation of grief and gladness that scores our improbable and finite lives.
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One Fine Day: David Byrne Performs His Hymn of Optimism and Countercultural Anthem of Resistance and Resilience with the Brooklyn Youth Chorus
Maria Popova | Brain Pickings – TRANSCEND Media Service,
1 Nov 2021
“I complete my tasks, one by one. I remove my masks, when I am done…”
→ read full articleBeloved Writers on the Mightiest Antidote to Depression
Maria Popova | Brain Pickings – TRANSCEND Media Service,
25 Oct 2021
“It is not upon you alone the dark patches fall, the dark threw its patches down upon me also,” Walt Whitman wrote. On the consolations of monarchs and of stars.
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Thomas Wolfe on Ambition, Gratitude, and the True Measure of Success, in Letters to His Mother
Maria Popova | Brain Pickings – TRANSCEND Media Service,
18 Oct 2021
“It is not all bad, but it is not all good, it is not all ugly, but it is not all beautiful, it is life, life, life — the only thing that matters.”
→ read full articlePlace, Personhood, and the Hippocampus: The Fascinating Science of Magnetism, Autonoeic Consciousness, and What Makes Us Who We Are
Maria Popova | Brain Pickings – TRANSCEND Media Service,
11 Oct 2021
“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.”
→ read full articleBridging the Island Universes of Our Experience: Aldous Huxley on Making Sense of Ourselves and Each Other
Maria Popova | Brain Pickings – TRANSCEND Media Service,
27 Sep 2021
“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.”
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Mary’s Room: An Animated Inquiry into the Limits of Knowledge and the Mystery of Consciousness
Maria Popova | Brain Pickings – TRANSCEND Media Service,
20 Sep 2021
The gasp beyond fact, contouring the central question of what it is like to be you.
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An Illustrated Love Letter to Rivers
Maria Popova | Brain Pickings – TRANSCEND Media Service,
13 Sep 2021
A painted landscape of fact and feeling along the flow of existence.
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When Did Time Really Begin? The Little Loophole in the Big Bang
Maria Popova | Brain Pickings – TRANSCEND Media Service,
6 Sep 2021
A pleasurable warping of the figuring faculty to contemplate what was there before the before.
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Why Time Slows down When We’re Afraid, Speeds up as We Age, and Gets Warped on Vacation
Maria Popova | Brain Pickings – TRANSCEND Media Service,
23 Aug 2021
“Time perception matters because it is the experience of time that roots us in our mental reality.”
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The Invention of Zero: How Ancient Mesopotamia Created the Mathematical Concept of Nought and Ancient India Gave It Symbolic Form
Maria Popova | Brain Pickings – TRANSCEND Media Service,
16 Aug 2021
“If you look at zero you see nothing; but look through it and you will see the world.” –Mathematician Robert Kaplan. If the ancient Arab world had closed its gates to foreign travelers, we would have no medicine, no astronomy, and no mathematics — at least not as we know them today.
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Richard Dawkins on the Luckiness of Death
Maria Popova | Brain Pickings – TRANSCEND Media Service,
9 Aug 2021
“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.” Consider this.
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The Soul of an Octopus: How One of Earth’s Most Alien Creatures Illuminates the Wonders of Consciousness
Maria Popova | Brain Pickings – TRANSCEND Media Service,
26 Jul 2021
“While stroking an octopus, it is easy to fall into reverie. To share such a moment of deep tranquility with another being, especially one as different from us as the octopus, is a humbling privilege… an uplink to universal consciousness.”
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Probable Impossibilities: Physicist Alan Lightman on Beginnings, Endings, and What Makes Life Worth Living
Maria Popova | Brain Pickings – TRANSCEND Media Service,
19 Jul 2021
How our cosmic improbability confers dignity and meaning upon our shared existence. Poetic physicist Alan Lightman sieves four centuries of scientific breakthroughs to estimate that even with habitable planets orbiting one tenth of all stars, the faction of living matter in the universe is about one-billionth of one-billionth: If all the matter in the universe were the Gobi desert, life would be but a single grain of sand.
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An Antidote to the Age of Anxiety: Alan Watts on Happiness and How to Live with Presence
Maria Popova | Brain Pickings – TRANSCEND Media Service,
12 Jul 2021
Wisdom on overcoming the greatest human frustration from the pioneer of Eastern philosophy in the West.
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The Mirror of Enigmas: Chance, the Universe, and the Pale Blues of Knowing Who We Are
Maria Popova | Brain Pickings – TRANSCEND Media Service,
5 Jul 2021
“There is no human being on earth capable of declaring with certitude who s/he is.” It takes a great sobriety of spirit to know your own depths–and your limits. It takes a special grandeur of spirit to know the limits of your self-knowledge.
→ read full article
How to Love: Legendary Zen Buddhist Teacher Thich Nhat Hanh on Mastering the Art of “Interbeing”
Maria Popova | Brain Pickings – TRANSCEND Media Service,
28 Jun 2021
“To love without knowing how to love wounds the person we love.”
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Seneca on Grief and the Key to Resilience in the Face of Loss: An Extraordinary Letter to His Mother
Maria Popova | Brain Pickings – TRANSCEND Media Service,
31 May 2021
“All your sorrows have been wasted on you if you have not yet learned how to be wretched.”
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Aldous Huxley on the Transcendent Power of Music and Why It Sings to Our Souls
Maria Popova | Brain Pickings – TRANSCEND Media Service,
24 May 2021
“After silence that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.”
→ read full articleBetween Science and Magic: How Hummingbirds Hover at the Edge of the Possible
Maria Popova | Brain Pickings – TRANSCEND Media Service,
17 May 2021
How a tiny creature faster than the Space Shuttle balances the impossible equation of extreme fragility and superhuman strength.
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The Soul-Expanding Value of Difficulty: Rilke on How Great Sadnesses Transform Us and Bring Us Closer to Ourselves
Maria Popova | Brain Pickings – TRANSCEND Media Service,
10 May 2021
“That is at bottom the only courage that is demanded of us: to have courage for the most strange, the most singular and the most inexplicable that we may encounter.”
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The Spirituality of Science and the Wonder of the Wilderness
Maria Popova | Brain Pickings – TRANSCEND Media Service,
3 May 2021
Ornithologist and Wildlife Ecologist J. Drew Lanham on Nature as Worship – “As I wander into the predawn dark of an autumn wood, I feel the presence of things beyond flesh, bone, and blood. My being expands to fit the limitlessness of the wild world.”
→ read full articleThe Stoic Antidote to Frustration: Marcus Aurelius on How to Keep Your Mental Composure and Emotional Equanimity When People Let You Down
Maria Popova | Brain Pickings – TRANSCEND Media Service,
26 Apr 2021
The art of tempering your fury with an infuriating existential truth. The vast majority of our mental, emotional, and spiritual suffering comes from the violent collision between our expectations and reality. As we dust ourselves off amid the rubble, bruised and indignant, we further pain ourselves with the exertion of staggering emotional energy on outrage at how reality dared defy what we demanded of it.
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Maya Angelou (4 Apr 1928 – 28 May 2014): Identity and the Meaning of Life
Maria Popova, Brain Pickings – TRANSCEND Media Service,
29 Mar 2021
Angelou’s timeless wisdom shines with unparalleled light in a 1977 interview by journalist Judith Rich, in which Angelou explores issues of identity and the meaning of life.
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“Little Prince” Author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry on Losing a Friend
Maria Popova | Brain Pickings – TRANSCEND Media Service,
29 Mar 2021
“Old friends cannot be created out of hand. Nothing can match the treasure of common memories, of trials endured together, of quarrels and reconciliations and generous emotions.”
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The Pattern inside the Pattern: Fractals, the Hidden Order beneath Chaos…
Maria Popova | Brain Pickings – TRANSCEND Media Service,
15 Mar 2021
… and the Story of the Refugee Who Revolutionized the Mathematics of Reality – I have learned that the lines we draw to contain the infinite end up excluding more than they enfold. I have learned that most things in life are better and more beautiful not linear but fractal. Love especially. “In the mind’s eye, a fractal is a way of seeing infinity.”
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Philosopher Martin Buber on What Trees Teach Us about Being More Human…
Maria Popova | Brain Pickings – TRANSCEND Media Service,
8 Mar 2021
… and Mastering the Difficult Art of Seeing Others as They Truly Are – Contemplating the difference between objectifying and subjectifying the universe. I and Thou, I-Thou. Jewish Philosopher Martin Buber explores his 1923 existentialist masterpiece, laying out his visionary lens on what makes us real to one another.
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Confucius on Good Government, the 6 Steps to a Harmonious Society, and Self-Discipline as the Key to Democracy
Maria Popova | Brain Pickings – TRANSCEND Media Service,
1 Mar 2021
Ezra Pound observed that China was tranquil and harmonious for as long as its rulers followed the teachings of Confucius, but dynasties collapsed into chaos and social catastrophe as soon as these principles were neglected. “Things have roots and branches… If the root be in confusion, nothing will be well governed.” — Confucius
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Alain de Botton on Existential Maturity and What Emotional Intelligence Really Means
Maria Popova | Brain Pickings – TRANSCEND Media Service,
22 Feb 2021
“The emotionally intelligent person knows that they will only ever be mentally healthy in a few areas and at certain moments, but is committed to fathoming their inadequacies and warning others of them in good time, with apology and charm.”
→ read full articleAnaïs Nin on Inner Conflict, the Interconnectedness of All Things, and What Maturity Really Means
Maria Popova | Brain Pickings – TRANSCEND Media Service,
15 Feb 2021
“We are all one question, and the best answer seems to be love — a connection between things.” “Any experience carried out deeply to its ultimate leads you beyond yourself into a larger relation to the experience of others.”
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The Boy Whose Head Was Filled with Stars: The Inspiring Illustrated Story of How Edwin Hubble Revolutionized Our Understanding of the Universe
Maria Popova | Brain Pickings – TRANSCEND Media Service,
1 Feb 2021
The law underlying the universe’s expansion would come to bear Hubble’s name, as would the ambitious space telescope that would give humanity an unprecedented glimpse of a cosmos “so brutal and alive it seemed to comprehend us back.” Hubble’s Law staggers the imagination with the awareness that even our most intimate celestial companion, the Moon, is slowly moving away from us every day, about as fast as your fingernails grow.
→ read full articleWalt Whitman on What Makes a Great Person and What Wisdom Really Means
Maria Popova | Brain Pickings – TRANSCEND Media Service,
21 Dec 2020
“The past, the future, majesty, love — if they are vacant of you, you are vacant of them.”
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Vincent van Gogh on Art and the Power of Love in Letters to His Brother
Maria Popova | Brain Pickings – TRANSCEND Media Service,
14 Dec 2020
Whosoever loves much performs much, and can accomplish much, and what is done in love is well done! Everyone who works with love and with intelligence finds in the very sincerity of his love for nature and art a kind of armor against the opinions of other people.
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Beyond Good and Evil: Nietzsche on Love, Perseverance, and the True Mark of Greatness
Maria Popova | Brain Pickings – TRANSCEND Media Service,
7 Dec 2020
A man of genius is unbearable, unless he possess at least two things besides: gratitude and purity. What is done out of love always takes place beyond good and evil.
→ read full articleThe Love of Truth and the Truth of Love: Bertrand Russell on the Two Pillars of Human Flourishing
Maria Popova | Brain Pickings – TRANSCEND Media Service,
30 Nov 2020
“Fanaticism is the danger of the world. It always has been and has done untold harm. I think fanaticism is the greatest danger there is. I might almost say that I was fanatical against fanaticism.” When asked what, in nearly ninety years of living, he has learned about life that he considers most important to pass on to posterity, Russell offers two things — “one intellectual and one moral.”
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Bruce Lee on Death and What It Takes to Be an Artist of Life
Maria Popova | Brain Pickings – TRANSCEND Media Service,
16 Nov 2020
On the bench across from Bruce Lee’s tombstone, these words of tribute appear: “The key to immortality is first living a life worth remembering.” The animating ethos of that uncommon life comes newly alive in ‘Be Water, My Friend: The Teachings of Bruce Lee’ by his daughter, Shannon Lee.
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The Science of How Alive You Really Are: Alan Turing, Trees, and the Wonder of Life
Maria Popova | Brain Pickings – TRANSCEND Media Service,
9 Nov 2020
We are, then, built of living bricks, but of living bricks set in dead mortar. We saw that the great trees, complex and long lived, have more wood and bark and other dead substances in them than the shrubs, herbs, and grass. These in turn are less alive than the lowly water plants and yeasts and molds which have no wood or bark at all. The same is true of animals. The jelly-fishes and infusoria have neither skin, hair, bones, nails, nor blood, and are pretty much all alive. So the more a creature’s life is worth, the less of it is alive.
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The Body Politic Electric: Walt Whitman on Women’s Centrality to Democracy
Maria Popova | Brain Pickings – TRANSCEND Media Service,
26 Oct 2020
“Have I not said that womanhood involves all? Have I not told how the universe has nothing better than the best womanhood?”
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Nietzsche on the Journey of Becoming and What It Means to Be a Free Spirit
Maria Popova | Brain Pickings – TRANSCEND Media Service,
19 Oct 2020
“…become master over yourself, master of your own good qualities… acquire power over your aye and no and learn to hold and withhold them in accordance with your higher aims…” “No one can build you the bridge on which you, and only you, must cross the river of life.” –Friedrich Nietzsche
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Susan Sontag on Moral Courage and the Power of Principled Resistance to Injustice
Maria Popova | Brain Pickings – TRANSCEND Media Service,
12 Oct 2020
“Fear binds people together. And fear disperses them. Courage inspires communities: the courage of an example — for courage is as contagious as fear.”
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Cosmic Consciousness: Maurice Bucke’s Pioneering 19th-Century Theory of Transcendence and the Six Steps of Illumination
Maria Popova | Brain Pickings – TRANSCEND Media Service,
5 Oct 2020
We are not “patches of life scattered through an infinite sea of non-living substance” but “specks of relative death in an infinite ocean of life.”
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“Little Prince” Author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry on Love, Mortality, and Night as an Existential Clarifying Force for the Deepest Truths of the Heart
Maria Popova | Brain Pickings – TRANSCEND Media Service,
21 Sep 2020
“Day belongs to family quarrels, but with the night he who has quarreled finds love again. For love is greater than any wind of words… Love is not thinking, but being.”
→ read full articleJames Baldwin’s Advice on Writing
Maria Popova | Brain Pickings – TRANSCEND Media Service,
7 Sep 2020
“Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but most of all, endurance.”
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D.H. Lawrence on Trees, Solitude, and How We Root Ourselves When Relationships Collapse
Maria Popova | Brain Pickings – TRANSCEND Media Service,
31 Aug 2020
“One must possess oneself, and be alone in possession of oneself.”
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Conscience in Revolt: Sophie Scholl on Suffering, Strength, and the Deepest Wellspring of Courage
Maria Popova | Brain Pickings – TRANSCEND Media Service,
24 Aug 2020
“Sympathy is often difficult and soon becomes hollow if one feels no pain oneself.”
→ read full articleBeethoven on Creative Vitality and Resilience in the Face of Suffering
Maria Popova | Brain Pickings – TRANSCEND Media Service,
17 Aug 2020
“Day by day I am approaching the goal which I apprehend but cannot describe.” He would go on to cultivate a lifestyle regimen that sustains a superhuman vitality, to embody the crucial difference between genius and talent, and to believe that music saved his life.
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