Articles by Maria Popova

We found 345 results.


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.

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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.”

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Between 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.”

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The 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.”

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Anaïs 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.

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Walt 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.

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The 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.”

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James 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.”

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Beethoven 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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Ursula K. Le Guin on Suffering and Getting to the Other Side of Pain
Maria Popova | Brain Pickings – TRANSCEND Media Service, 10 Aug 2020

Simone Weil considered it the highest existential discipline to “make use of the sufferings that chance inflicts upon us.” George Bernard Shaw saw suffering as our supreme conduit to empathy. “We suffer more in imagination than in reality,” Seneca observed in his timeless antidote to anxiety. “All you have is what you are, and what you give.”

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Thoreau on Knowing vs. Seeing and What It Takes to Apprehend Reality Unblinded by Our Preconceptions
Maria Popova | Brain Pickings – TRANSCEND Media Service, 27 Jul 2020

“We hear and apprehend only what we already half know.”

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Nature as an Antidote to Depression
Maria Popova | Brain Pickings – TRANSCEND Media Service, 13 Jul 2020

On the Consolations of Monarchs and of Stars – “It is not upon you alone the dark patches fall, the dark threw its patches down upon me also,” Walt Whitman wrote.

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The Magic of Moss and What It Teaches Us about the Art of Attentiveness to Life at All Scales
Maria Popova | Brain Pickings – TRANSCEND Media Service, 6 Jul 2020

“Life [exists] only because of a myriad of synchronicities that bring us to this particular place at this particular moment. In return for such a gift, the only sane response is to glitter in reply.”

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Gardening and the Secret of Happiness
Maria Popova | Brain Pickings – TRANSCEND Media Service, 22 Jun 2020

“It came to me while picking beans, the secret of happiness.”

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Wonder and the Sacred Search for Truth: Ann Druyan on Why the Scientific Method Is like Love
Maria Popova | Brain Pickings – TRANSCEND Media Service, 8 Jun 2020

An invitation “to feel more intensely the romance of science and the wonder of being alive right now, at these particular coordinates in spacetime, less alone, more at home, here in the cosmos.”

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Yes to Life, in Spite of Everything: Moving beyond Optimism and Pessimism to Find the Deepest Source of Meaning
Maria Popova | Brain Pickings – TRANSCEND Media Service, 1 Jun 2020

“Everything depends on the individual human being, regardless of how small a number of like-minded people there is… each person, through action and not mere words, creatively making the meaning of life a reality in his or her own being.”

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Consolation for Sorrow from King Arthur’s Court: Merlyn’s Advice on What to Do When the World Gets You Down
Maria Popova | Brain Pickings – TRANSCEND Media Service, 18 May 2020

“Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting.”

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What It Takes to Grow Up, What It Means to Have Grown
Maria Popova | Brain Pickings – TRANSCEND Media Service, 11 May 2020

I suspect it is simply a feature of being an adult, what I will call being grown, or a grown person, to have endured some variety of thorough emotional turmoil, to have made your way to the brink, and, if you’re lucky, to have stepped back from it — if not permanently, then for some time, or time to time…

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Standing on the Shoulders of Solitude: Newton, the Plague, and How Quarantine Fomented the Greatest Leap in Science
Maria Popova | Brain Pickings – TRANSCEND Media Service, 4 May 2020

“Truth is the offspring of silence and meditation.” In the 1650s, the penumbra of plague slowly began eclipsing Europe. Italy fell first, soon Spain, then Germany, then Holland.

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The Difficult Art of Self-Compassion
Maria Popova | Brain Pickings – TRANSCEND Media Service, 20 Apr 2020

“We need to re-learn the value of calculated moments of self-compassion; we need to appreciate the role of self-care in a good, ambitious and fruitful life.”
“Compassion asks us to look into our own hearts, discover what gives us pain, and then refuse, under any circumstance whatsoever, to inflict that pain on anybody else.”
“Have compassion for everyone you meet … You do not know what wars are going on down there, where the spirit meets the bone.”

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Marcus Aurelius in Love: The Future Stoic Philosopher and Roman Emperor’s Passionate Teenage Love Letters to His Tutor
Maria Popova | Brain Pickings – TRANSCEND Media Service, 13 Apr 2020

“Who we are and who we become depends, in part, on whom we love,” a trio of psychologists wrote in their wonderful inquiry into limbic revision and how love rewires the brain. But whom we love equally depends on who we are and who we want to become. Love, like time, is as much a function of us as we are a function of it.

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An Antidote to Helplessness and Disorientation: The Great Humanistic Philosopher and Psychologist Erich Fromm on Our Human Fragility as the Key to Our Survival and Our Sanity
Maria Popova | Brain Pickings – TRANSCEND Media Service, 6 Apr 2020

“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.”

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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, 30 Mar 2020

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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Alain de Botton on Existential Maturity and What Emotional Intelligence Really Means
Maria Popova | Brain Pickings – TRANSCEND Media Service, 23 Mar 2020

“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.”

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Calculating the Incalculable: Thoreau on the True Value of a Tree
Maria Popova | Brain Pickings – TRANSCEND Media Service, 16 Mar 2020

“What would human life be without forests, those natural cities?”

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The Haunting Beauty of Snowflakes: Wilson Bentley’s Pioneering 19th-Century Photomicroscopy of Snow Crystals
Maria Popova | Brain Pickings – TRANSCEND Media Service, 9 Mar 2020

Hardly any scientific finding has permeated popular culture more profoundly, transmuted its truth into a more pervasive cliché, or inspired more uninspired college application essays than the fact that no two snowflakes are alike.

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Erich Fromm’s 6 Rules of Listening: The Great Humanistic Philosopher and Psychologist on the Art of Unselfish Understanding
Maria Popova | Brain Pickings – TRANSCEND Media Service, 10 Feb 2020

“Understanding and loving are inseparable. If they are separate, it is a cerebral process and the door to essential understanding remains closed.”

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An Alternative View of Human Nature: Rebecca Solnit on Disaster as a Catalyst for Dignity, Agency, and Human Goodness
Maria Popova | Brain Pickings – TRANSCEND Media Service, 27 Jan 2020

“The constellations of solidarity, altruism, and improvisation are within most of us and reappear at these times.”

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Dostoyevsky, Just After His Death Sentence Was Repealed, on the Meaning of Life
Maria Popova | Brain Pickings – TRANSCEND Media Service, 6 Jan 2020

“To be a human being among people and to remain one forever, no matter in what circumstances, not to grow despondent and not to lose heart — that’s what life is all about, that’s its task.”

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Shelley’s Prescient Case for Animal Rights and the Spiritual Value of Vegetarianism
Maria Popova | Brain Pickings – TRANSCEND Media Service, 30 Dec 2019

Since the dawn of our species and its consciousness, we have reverenced other animals and incorporated them into our myths and our metaphors, into the basic fabric of our stories. But we have also eaten them — we may be the storytelling animal, but we are fundamentally animal. “By all that is sacred in our hopes for the human race, I conjure those who love happiness and truth, to give a fair trial to the vegetable system.”

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13 Life-Learnings from 13 Years of Brain Pickings
Maria Popova | Brain Pickings – TRANSCEND Media Service, 23 Dec 2019

More Fluid Reflections on Keeping a Solid Center – On October 23, 2006, Brain Pickings was born as a plain-text email to seven friends. It was then, and continues to be, a labor of love and ledger of curiosity, although the mind and heart from which it sprang have changed — have grown, I hope — tremendously.

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The Book of Delights: Poet and Gardener Ross Gay’s Yearlong Experiment in Willful Gladness
Maria Popova | Brain Pickings – TRANSCEND Media Service, 16 Dec 2019

“The more you study delight, the more delight there is to study… I felt my life to be more full of delight. Not without sorrow or fear or pain or loss. But more full of delight.”

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Kahlil Gibran on Silence, Solitude, and the Courage to Know Yourself
Maria Popova | Brain Pickings – TRANSCEND Media Service, 2 Dec 2019

“In much of your talking, thinking is half murdered. For thought is a bird of space, that in a cage of words may indeed unfold its wings but cannot fly.”

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The Lonely Genius Arthur Eddington Who Confirmed Einstein’s Relativity
Maria Popova | Brain Pickings – TRANSCEND Media Service, 18 Nov 2019

Eddington never married, never had another intimate bond. He lived out his days with his sister, Winifred, who also never married. I picture him Turing-like — in his genius, in his misapprehended awkwardness, in his loneliness and heartbreak. That invisible private side to the public genius is what Gaiman takes up in his poem, celebrating what he calls these “twin suns” of Eddington’s life, the public self and the private self, of genius and loneliness, of intellectual heroism and emotional heartbreak, that shine in varying degrees on every human life.

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E.F. Schumacher’s “A Guide for the Perplexed”: Mapping the Meaning of Life and the Four Levels of Being
Maria Popova | Brain Pickings – TRANSCEND Media Service, 11 Nov 2019

How to harness the uniquely human power of “consciousness recoiling upon itself.”

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The Writing of “Silent Spring”: Rachel Carson and the Culture-Shifting Courage to Speak Inconvenient Truth to Power
Maria Popova | Brain Pickings – TRANSCEND Media Service, 4 Nov 2019

A woman scientist without a Ph.D. or an academic affiliation became the most powerful voice of resistance against ruinous public policy mitigated by the self-interest of government and industry. “It is, in the deepest sense, a privilege as well as a duty to have the opportunity to speak out — to many thousands of people — on something so important.”

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D.H. Lawrence on the Antidote to the Malady of Materialism
Maria Popova | Brain Pickings – TRANSCEND Media Service, 28 Oct 2019

“Owners and owned, they are like the two sides of a ghastly disease. One feels a sort of madness come over one, as if the world had become hell. But it is only superimposed: it is only a temporary disease. It can be cleaned away.”

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Buddhist Economics: How to Start Prioritizing People over Products and Creativity over Consumption
Maria Popova | Brain Pickings – TRANSCEND Media Service, 21 Oct 2019

What does it really mean to create wealth for people — for humanity — as opposed to money for governments and corporations? That’s precisely what the influential German-born British economist, statistician E. F. Schumacher explores in his seminal 1973 book Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered.

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When Breath Becomes Air: A Young Neurosurgeon Examines the Meaning of Life as He Faces His Death
Maria Popova | Brain Pickings – TRANSCEND Media Service, 14 Oct 2019

As a doctor at age thirty-six, I had had some sense of what patients with life-changing illnesses faced — and it was exactly these moments I had wanted to explore with them. Shouldn’t terminal illness, then, be the perfect gift to that young man who had wanted to understand death? What better way to understand it than to live it? But I’d had no idea how hard it would be, how much terrain I would have to explore, map, settle. I’d always imagined the doctor’s work as something like connecting two pieces of railroad track, allowing a smooth journey for the patient. I hadn’t expected the prospect of facing my own mortality to be so disorienting, so dislocating.

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How Van Gogh Found His Purpose: Heartfelt Letters to His Brother on How Relationships Refine Us
Maria Popova | Brain Pickings – TRANSCEND Media Service, 2 Sep 2019

“Does what goes on inside show on the outside? Someone has a great fire in his soul and nobody ever comes to warm themselves at it, and passers-by see nothing but a little smoke at the top of the chimney.”

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Altered States of Consciousness: The Neuropsychology of How Time Perception Modulates Our Experience of Self, from Depression to Boredom to Creative Flow
Maria Popova | Brain Pickings – TRANSCEND Media Service, 26 Aug 2019

“The brain does not simply represent the world in a disembodied way as an intellectual construct… Our mind is body-bound. We think, feel, and act with our body in the world. All experience is embedded in this body-related being-in-the-world.”

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Borders and Belonging: Toni Morrison’s Prescient Wisdom on the Refugee Struggle, the Violence of Otherness, and the Meaning of Home
Maria Popova | Brain Pickings – TRANSCEND Media Service, 19 Aug 2019

“It may be that the most defining characteristic of our times is that, again, walls and weapons feature as prominently now as they once did in medieval times.”

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Toni Morrison on the Power of Language: Her Spectacular Nobel Acceptance Speech after Becoming the First African American Woman Awarded the Accolade
Maria Popova | Brain Pickings – TRANSCEND Media Service, 12 Aug 2019

“We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.”

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Leo Tolstoy on Kindness and the Measure of Love
Maria Popova | Brain Pickings – TRANSCEND Media Service, 12 Aug 2019

“Nothing can make our life, or the lives of other people, more beautiful than perpetual kindness. Kindness is for your soul as health is for your body: you do not notice it when you have it.”

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The Science of Sleep: Dreaming, Depression, and How REM Sleep Regulates Negative Emotions
Maria Popova | Brain Pickings – TRANSCEND Media Service, 5 Aug 2019

“Memory is never a precise duplicate of the original… it is a continuing act of creation. Dream images are the product of that creation.”

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Tim Ferriss on How He Survived Suicidal Depression and His Tools for Warding Off the Darkness
Maria Popova | Brain Pickings – TRANSCEND Media Service, 29 Jul 2019

“The key is building fires where you can warm yourself as you wait for the tempest to pass.”

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The Joy of Suffering Overcome: Young Beethoven’s Stirring Letter to His Brothers about the Loneliness of Living with Deafness and How Music Saved His Life
Maria Popova | Brain Pickings – TRANSCEND Media Service, 22 Jul 2019

“Ah! how could I possibly quit the world before bringing forth all that I felt it was my vocation to produce?” Like Frida Kahlo, Beethoven sublimated a lifetime of unbearable bodily suffering to the irrepressible vitality of his creative spirit. Bedeviled by debilitating physical illness and loss of hearing at the age of twenty-eight, he nonetheless became a servant of joy. Even Helen Keller, herself deaf and blind, conveyed the timeless transcendence of his music in her moving account of “hearing” his Ode to Joy.

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Against Busyness and Surfaces: Emerson on Living with Presence and Authenticity
Maria Popova | Brain Pickings – TRANSCEND Media Service, 15 Jul 2019

“After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, love, and so on — have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear — what remains? Nature remains; to bring out from their torpid recesses, the affinities of a man or woman with the open air, the trees, fields, the changes of seasons — the sun by day and the stars of heaven by night.” — Walt Whitman

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“Little Prince” Author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry on Losing a Friend
Maria Popova | Brain Pickings – TRANSCEND Media Service, 24 Jun 2019

“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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Kierkegaard on the Individual vs. the Crowd, Why We Conform, and the Power of the Minority
Maria Popova | Brain Pickings – TRANSCEND Media Service, 10 Jun 2019

“Truth always rests with the minority … because the minority is generally formed by those who really have an opinion, while the strength of a majority is illusory, formed by the gangs who have no opinion.”

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How to Keep Criticism from Sinking Your Confidence: Walt Whitman and the Discipline of Creative Self-Esteem
Maria Popova | Brain Pickings – TRANSCEND Media Service, 3 Jun 2019

“I do not trouble my spirit to vindicate itself or be understood.”

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Germaine de Staël’s Guide to Haters
Maria Popova | Brain Pickings – TRANSCEND Media Service, 27 May 2019

The First Modern Woman on Meritocracy, the Psychology of Why the Masses Rejoice in Tearing Down Successful Individuals, and the Only True Measure of Genius – “The life of man, so short in itself, is still of longer duration than the judgment and the affections of his contemporaries.”

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The Art of Being Alone: May Sarton’s Stunning 1938 Ode to Solitude
Maria Popova | Brain Pickings – TRANSCEND Media Service, 20 May 2019

“There is no place more intimate than the spirit alone.”

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Antoine de Saint-Exupéry on How a Simple Human Smile Saved His Life
Maria Popova| Brain Pickings – TRANSCEND Media Service, 13 May 2019

“Care granted to the sick, welcome offered to the banished, forgiveness itself are worth nothing without a smile enlightening the deed.”

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Rachel Carson on Writing and the Loneliness of Creative Work
Maria Popova | Brain Pickings – TRANSCEND Media Service, 6 May 2019

“If you write what you yourself sincerely think and feel and are interested in… you will interest other people.”

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The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone
Maria Popova | Brain Pickings – TRANSCEND Media Service, 29 Apr 2019

“Loneliness is difficult to confess; difficult too to categorise. Like depression, a state with which it often intersects, it can run deep in the fabric of a person.”

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Stress and the Social Self: How Relationships Affect Our Immune System
Maria Popova | Brain Pickings – TRANSCEND Media Service, 15 Apr 2019

“We are all tethered to our social worlds by invisible but steel strong wires.” Relationships refine our truths. But they also, it turns out, refine our immune systems. That’s what pioneering immunologist Esther Sternberg examines in The Balance Within: The Science Connecting Health and Emotions — a revelatory inquiry into how emotional stress affects our susceptibility to burnout and disease.

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Thoreau on the Long Cycles of Social Change and the Importance of Not Mistaking Politics for Progress
Maria Popova | Brain Pickings – TRANSCEND Media Service, 8 Apr 2019

All men are partially buried in the grave of custom, and of some we see only the crown of the head above ground. Better are the physically dead, for they more lively rot. Even virtue is no longer such if it be stagnant. A man’s life should be constantly as fresh as this river. It should be the same channel, but a new water every instant. The longer the lever the less perceptible its motion… The hero then will know how to wait, as well as to make haste. All good abides with him who waiteth wisely.

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Pablo Neruda: Against the Illusion of Separateness
Maria Popova | Brain Pickings – TRANSCEND Media Service, 1 Apr 2019

There is no insurmountable solitude. All paths lead to the same goal: to convey to others what we are. And we must pass through solitude and difficulty, isolation and silence in order to reach forth to the enchanted place where we can dance our clumsy dance and sing our sorrowful song — but in this dance or in this song there are fulfilled the most ancient rites of our conscience in the awareness of being human and of believing in a common destiny.

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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, 1 Apr 2019

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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The Difficult Balance of Intimacy and Independence: Beloved Philosopher and Poet Kahlil Gibran on the Secret to a Loving and Lasting Relationship
Maria Popova | Brain Pickings – TRANSCEND Media Service, 25 Mar 2019

“Love one another but make not a bond of love: let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.”

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Create Dangerously: Albert Camus on the Artist as a Voice of Resistance and a Liberator of Society
Maria Popova | Brain Pickings – TRANSCEND Media Service, 18 Mar 2019

“To create today is to create dangerously… The question, for all those who cannot live without art and what it signifies, is merely to find out how, among the police forces of so many ideologies… the strange liberty of creation is possible.”

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John Steinbeck on Good and Evil, the Necessary Contradictions of the Human Nature, and Our Grounds for Lucid Hope
Maria Popova | Brain Pickings – TRANSCEND Media Service, 11 Mar 2019

“All the goodness and the heroisms will rise up again, then be cut down again and rise up. It isn’t that the evil thing wins — it never will — but that it doesn’t die.”

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Nobel-Winning Physicist Niels Bohr on Subjective vs. Objective Reality and the Uses of Religion in a Secular World
Maria Popova | Brain Pickings – TRANSCEND Media Service, 4 Mar 2019

“The fact that religions through the ages have spoken in images, parables, and paradoxes means simply that there are no other ways of grasping the reality to which they refer. But that does not mean that it is not a genuine reality. And splitting this reality into an objective and a subjective side won’t get us very far.”

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Carl Sagan on Mystery, Why Common Sense Blinds Us to the Universe, and How to Live with the Unknown
Maria Popova | Brain Pickings – TRANSCEND Media Service, 25 Feb 2019

“We are bathing in mystery and confusion on many subjects, and I think that will always be our destiny. The universe will always be much richer than our ability to understand it.”

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Against the Illusion of Separateness: Pablo Neruda’s Beautiful and Humanistic Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech
Maria Popova | Brain Pickings – TRANSCEND Media Service, 4 Feb 2019

Our original guiding stars are struggle and hope. But there is no such thing as a lone struggle, no such thing as a lone hope. In every human being are combined the most distant epochs, passivity, mistakes, sufferings, the pressing urgencies of our own time, the pace of history.

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Hermann Hesse on Solitude, the Value of Hardship, the Courage to Be Yourself, and How to Find Your Destiny
Maria Popova | Brain Pickings – TRANSCEND Media Service, 4 Feb 2019

Most men, the herd, have never tasted solitude. They leave father and mother, but only to crawl to a wife and quietly succumb to new warmth and new ties. They are never alone, they never commune with themselves. And when a solitary man crosses their path, they fear him and hate him like the plague; they fling stones at him and find no peace until they are far away from him. The air around him smells of stars, of cold stellar spaces; he lacks the soft warm fragrance of the home and hatchery.

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A Small Dark Light: The Legacy of the Tao Te Ching and What It Continues to Teach Us about Personal and Political Power 2,500 Years Later
Maria Popova | Brain Pickings – TRANSCEND Media Service, 31 Dec 2018

“It is the profound modesty of the language that offers what so many people for so many centuries have found in this book: a pure apprehension of the mystery of which we are part.”

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Thoreau on Nature as Prayer
Maria Popova | Brain Pickings – TRANSCEND Media Service, 24 Dec 2018

“In the street and in society I am almost invariably cheap and dissipated, my life is unspeakably mean. No amount of gold or respectability would in the least redeem it — dining with the Governor or a member of Congress!! But alone in distant woods or fields, in unpretending sprout lands or pastures tracked by rabbits, even on a black and, to most, cheerless day, like this, when a villager would be thinking of his inn, I come to myself, I once more feel myself grandly related, and that the cold and solitude are friends of mine.”

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Why Do Men Stupefy Themselves? Leo Tolstoy on Why We Drink
Maria Popova | Brain Pickings – TRANSCEND Media Service, 17 Dec 2018

The cause of the world-wide consumption of hashish, opium, wine, and tobacco, lies not in the taste, nor in any pleasure, recreation, or mirth they afford, but simply in man’s need to hide from himself the demands of conscience. When a man is sober he is ashamed of what seems all right when he is drunk. In these words we have the essential underlying cause prompting men to resort to stupefiers.

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Truth, Justice, and Public Good: Simone Weil on Political Manipulation, the Dangers of “For” and “Against,” and How to Save Thinking from Opinion
Maria Popova | Brain Pickings – TRANSCEND Media Service, 10 Dec 2018

“True attention is a state so difficult for any human creature, so violent, that any emotional disturbance can derail it. Therefore, one must always endeavour strenuously to protect one’s inner faculty of judgment against the turmoil of personal hopes and fears.”

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Nicole Krauss’s Beautiful Letter to Van Gogh on Fear, Bravery, and How to Break the Loop of Our Destructive Patterns
Maria Popova | Brain Pickings – TRANSCEND Media Service, 3 Dec 2018

“Bravery is always more intelligent than fear, since it is built on the foundation of what one knows about oneself: the knowledge of one’s strength and capacity, of one’s passion.”

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Why We Hurt Each Other: Tolstoy’s Letters to Gandhi on Love, Violence, and the Truth of the Human Spirit
Maria Popova | Brain Pickings – TRANSCEND Media Service, 26 Nov 2018

The exchange sparked an ongoing correspondence between the two that lasted until Tolstoy’s death — a meeting of two great minds and spirits, eventually collected in Letters from One: Correspondence (and more) of Leo Tolstoy and Mohandas Gandhi and rivaled only by Einstein’s correspondence with Freud on violence and human nature.

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The Dalai Lama on Science and Spirituality
Maria Popova | Brain Pickings – TRANSCEND Media Service, 26 Nov 2018

“What science finds to be nonexistent we should all accept as nonexistent, but what science merely does not find is a completely different matter.”

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Tchaikovsky on Depression and Finding Beauty amid the Wreckage of the Soul
Maria Popova | Brain Pickings – TRANSCEND Media Service, 19 Nov 2018

“Life is beautiful in spite of everything! … There are many thorns, but the roses are there too.”

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How Leo Tolstoy Found His Purpose: The Beloved Author on Personal Growth and the Meaning of Human Existence
Maria Popova | Brain Pickings – TRANSCEND Media Service, 12 Nov 2018

So I too shall be safe in taking for the aim of my existence a conscious striving for the universal development of everything existent. I should be the unhappiest of mortals if I could not find a purpose for my life, and a purpose at once universal and useful… Wherefore henceforth all my life must be a constant, active striving for that one purpose.

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Borges on Turning Trauma, Misfortune, and Humiliation into Raw Material for Art
Maria Popova | Brain Pickings – TRANSCEND Media Service, 22 Oct 2018

“All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.”

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