Brain Pickings by Maria PopovaPhilosophy How to Disappear: The Art of Listening to Silence in a Noisy WorldBrain Pickings by Maria Popova - Maria Popova“There is… the fertile silence of awareness, pasturing the soul… the silence of peaceful accord with other persons or communion with the cosmos,” Paul Goodman wrote in his 1972 taxonomy of the nine kinds
Brain Pickings by Maria PopovaPhilosophyTales of Mystery and Imagination: Rare, Arresting Illustrations for Edgar Allan Poe’s Short Stories by the Irish StainedBrain Pickings by Maria Popova - Maria Popova“I prefer the old fine-lined illustrations… I prefer Grimms’ fairy tales to the newspapers’ front pages,” the Nobel-winning Polish poet Wisława Szymborska wrote in her poignant poem “Possibilities.” Old
Brain Pickings by Maria PopovaPhilosophy Autumn Light: Pico Iyer on Finding Beauty in Impermanence and Luminosity in LossBrain Pickings by Maria Popova - Maria Popova“What do we have to hold on to? Only the certainty that nothing will go according to design; our hopes are newly built wooden houses, sturdy until someone drops a cigarette or match.” Rilke considered
Brain Pickings by Maria PopovaPhilosophy The Universe in Verse: Bill T. Jones Performs Poet Ross Gay’s Ode to Our Highest Human PotentialitiesBrain Pickings by Maria Popova - Maria Popova“…scream and scream and scream until you break the back of one injustice…” “Before I was born out of my mother, generations guided me,” Walt Whitman wrote in Song of Myself, envisioning his unborn self
Brain Pickings by Maria PopovaPhilosophy The Stunning Astronomical Beadwork of Native Artist Margaret NazonBrain Pickings by Maria Popova - Maria Popova“I wonder that I have so long been insensible to this charm in the skies, the tints of the different stars are so delicate in their variety,” the trailblazing astronomer Maria Mitchell marveled in her
Brain Pickings by Maria PopovaPhilosophy Lorraine Hansberry on Depression and Its Most Reliable AntidoteBrain Pickings by Maria Popova - Maria Popova“I am sitting here… feeling cold, useless, frustrated, helpless, disillusioned, angry and tired.” While I stand with Elizabeth Barrett Browning in her exquisite admonition against the dangerous myth of
Brain Pickings by Maria PopovaPhilosophy Kevin Kelly’s Letter to Children About the Glory of Books and the Superpower of Reading in an Image-Based Digital CultureBrain Pickings by Maria Popova - Maria Popova“More and more of our society is centered on pictures and images, which is a beautiful thing. But some of the most important parts of life are not visible in pictures.” In his epoch-making 1632 book Dialogue
Brain Pickings by Maria PopovaChildren's Books What Miss Mitchell Saw: A Lovely Picture-Book About the 19th-Century Astronomer Who Blazed the Way for Women in STEMBrain Pickings by Maria Popova - Maria PopovaAn illustrated homage to a rare visionary who opened up portals of possibility for generations. “Mingle the starlight with your lives and you won’t be fretted by trifles,” Maria Mitchell (August 1, 1818–June
Brain Pickings by Maria PopovaPoetry Shelley on Poetry and the Art of SeeingBrain Pickings by Maria Popova - Maria Popova“Poetry… reproduces the common universe of which we are portions and percipients, and it purges from our inward sight the film of familiarity which obscures from us the wonder of our being.” “We hear apprehend
Brain Pickings by Maria PopovaPhilosophy Year of the Monkey: Patti Smith on Dreams, Loss, Love, and Mending the Broken Realities of LifeBrain Pickings by Maria Popova - Maria Popova“One cannot ask for a life, or two lives. One can only warrant the hope of an increasing potency in each man’s heart.” “Life is a dream. ‘Tis waking that kills us,” Virginia Woolf wrote in Orlando — her
Brain Pickings by Maria PopovaPhilosophy Amanda Palmer Reads “When I Am Among the Trees” by Mary OliverBrain Pickings by Maria Popova - Maria Popova“You too have come into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled with light, and to shine.” “Aside from the appearance of a tree by day or night, is it not kin of the human family with its roots
Brain Pickings by Maria PopovaPhilosophy The Great Czech Playwright Turned Dissident Turned President Václav Havel on HopeBrain Pickings by Maria Popova - Maria Popova“Hope… is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously headed for early success, but, rather, an ability to work for something because it good,
Brain Pickings by Maria PopovaChildren's BooksAn Illustrated Ode to Attentiveness and the Art of Listening as a Wellspring of Self-Understanding, Empathy for Others, ReverenceBrain Pickings by Maria Popova - Maria Popova“To see takes time, like to have a friend takes time,” Georgia O’Keeffe wrote as she contemplated the art of seeing. To listen takes time, too — to learn to hear and befriend the world within and the without,
Brain Pickings by Maria PopovaPhilosophyUncommon Wisdom from a Forgotten Genius: Olga Jacoby’s Extraordinary Letters on Love, Life, Death, Moral Courage, and SpiritualBrain Pickings by Maria Popova - Maria Popova“Love, like strength and courage, is a strange thing; the more we give the more we find we have to give.” Half a century before Frida Kahlo made her impassioned case for atheism as a supreme form of freedom
Brain Pickings by Maria PopovaPhilosophyChaos, Time, and the Origin of Everything: Stephen Fry on How Ancient Greek Mythology and Modern Science Meet to IlluminateBrain Pickings by Maria Popova - Maria PopovaInside the “grand cosmic yawn” that gave us everything we’ve ever known (including the word “cosmos” itself). “Time is the substance I am made of,” Borges wrote in his sublime meditation on the most elemental
Brain Pickings by Maria PopovaPhilosophy A Pioneering Case for the Value of Citizen Science from the Polymathic Astronomer John HerschelBrain Pickings by Maria Popova - Maria Popova“There is scarcely any well-informed person, who, if he has but the will, has not also the power to add something essential to the general stock of knowledge.” “It is always difficult to teach the man
Brain Pickings by Maria PopovaPhilosophyThe First Surviving Photograph of the Moon: John Adams Whipple and How the Birth of Astrophotography Married ImmortalityBrain Pickings by Maria Popova - Maria PopovaA dual serenade to being and non-being, composed in glass, metal, and stardust. In 1847, the Harvard College Observatory acquired a colossal telescope dubbed the Great Refractor. It would remain the most
Brain Pickings by Maria PopovaPhilosophy On Children: Poignant Parenting Advice from Kahlil GibranBrain Pickings by Maria Popova - Maria Popova“Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself… You may give them your love but not your thoughts, for they have their own thoughts. You may house their
Brain Pickings by Maria PopovaDogs Does Your Dog Really Love You and What Does That Really Mean? A Journey in Cognitive Science and Moral PhilosophyBrain Pickings by Maria Popova - Maria Popova“Our inability to read dogs’ emotions well probably begins with our inability to understand our own emotions well.” That humans love their dogs is a fundamental fact of our animal heart, as indisputable
Brain Pickings by Maria Popova Through the First Antarctic Night: A Poetic Tribute and Testament to the Human Spirit from a Pioneering Polar ExplorerBrain Pickings by Maria Popova - Maria Popova“There was a naked fierceness in the scenes, a boisterous wildness in the storms, a sublimity and silence in the still, cold dayless nights, which were too impressive to be entirely overshadowed by the
Brain Pickings by Maria Popova Art, Atheism, and the Freedom of Expression: Frida Kahlo’s Searing Protest Letter to the President of MexicoBrain Pickings by Maria Popova - Maria PopovaA spirited defense of “public freedom of expression and opinion, the means of progress of every free people.” “Those who tell you ‘Do not put too much politics in your art’ are not being honest,” Chinua
Brain Pickings by Maria PopovaFriendship I Like You: An Almost Unbearably Lovely Vintage Illustrated Ode to FriendshipBrain Pickings by Maria Popova - Maria PopovaA touching serenade to the little things that add up to the bigness of a true platonic love. “Ponder for a long time whether you shall admit a given person to your friendship,” Seneca counseled two millennia
Brain Pickings by Maria Popova Advice to a Daughter from Pioneering Political Philosopher and Feminism Founding Mother Mary WollstonecraftBrain Pickings by Maria Popova - Maria Popova“Always appear what you are, and you will not pass through existence without enjoying its genuine blessings, love and respect.” Six years after Mary Wollstonecraft (April 27, 1759–September 10, 1797) her
Brain Pickings by Maria Popova Ancestor Worship with Mother Nature: How Indigenous Death Rituals Illuminate the Web of LifeBrain Pickings by Maria Popova - Maria Popova“For almost all oral cultures… the body’s decomposition into soil, worms, and dust can only signify the gradual reintegration of one’s ancestors and elders into the living landscape, from which all, too,
Brain Pickings by Maria PopovaBen Folds How to Find Your Artistic Voice: Ben Folds on Empathy, Creativity, and the Courage to Know YourselfBrain Pickings by Maria Popova - Maria Popova“What an artist has to offer is obvious to just about anyone else but the artist him- or herself.” “The best that can be said of my life so far is that it has been industrious, and the best that can be
Brain Pickings by Maria PopovaPhilosophyHow Nature Works, in Stunning Psychedelic Illustrations of Scientific Processes and Phenomena from a 19th-Century FrenchBrain Pickings by Maria Popova - Maria PopovaA scrumptious quest “to satisfy that invincible tendency of our minds, which urges us on to understand the reason of things.” A century before the trailblazing photographer Berenice Abbott created her
Brain Pickings by Maria PopovaPhilosophy Viktor Frankl on Humor as a Lifeline to Sanity and SurvivalBrain Pickings by Maria Popova - Maria Popova“Humor, more than anything else in the human make-up, can afford an aloofness and an ability to rise above any situation, even if only for a few seconds.” “When one is considering the universe,” Ella Sanders
Brain Pickings by Maria Popova Lord Byron’s Moving Elegy for His Beloved DogBrain Pickings by Maria Popova - Maria Popova“To mark a friend’s remains these stones arise; / I never knew but one — and here he lies.” “I am because my little dog knows me,” Gertrude Stein wrote. Who hasn’t found in the eyes of a beloved dog the
Brain Pickings by Maria Popova Underland: An Enchanting Journey into the Hidden Universe Beneath Our FeetBrain Pickings by Maria Popova - Maria Popova“Into the underland we have long placed that which we fear and wish to lose, and that which we love and wish to save.” “To sense this world of waters known to the creatures of the sea we must shed our
Brain Pickings by Maria Popova Against the Slippery Slope of Evil: Amanda Palmer Reads Wendell Berry’s Stunningly Prescient Poem “Questionnaire”Brain Pickings by Maria Popova - Maria PopovaThe road to moral hell is paved with gradual self-permission. “Under conditions of terror,” Hannah Arendt wrote in her classic treatise on the normalization of evil, “most people will comply but some will
