Emily Dickinson Spring with Emily DickinsonBrain Pickings by Maria Popova - Maria Popova“Today is very beautiful — just as bright, just as blue, just as green and as white, and as crimson, as the cherry trees full in bloom, and the half opening peach blossoms, and the grass just waving, sky
Philosophy A Stoic’s Key to Living with Presence: Seneca on the Existential Calculus of Saving, Spending, and Wasting TimeBrain Pickings by Maria Popova - Maria Popova“Lay hold of to-day’s task, and you will not need to depend so much upon to-morrow’s. While we are postponing, life speeds by. Nothing… is ours, except time.” “How we spend our days is, of course, how
Philosophy Zadie Smith Reads Frank O’Hara’s Love Poem to Time via an Old-Fashioned Telephone LineBrain Pickings by Maria Popova - Maria PopovaA bittersweet serenade to the bidirectional pull of existence. “Do you sometimes want to wake up to the singularity we once were?” poet Marie Howe asked in her stunning ode to time in memoriam of Stephen
Philosophy Jacqueline Woodson’s Lovely Letter to Children About Kindness, Presence, and How Books Transform UsBrain Pickings by Maria Popova - Maria Popova“Why are you kissing me in the middle of the sentence?!” “It is we who are passing when we say time passes,” the Nobel-winning French philosopher Henri Bergson insisted just before Einstein defeated him
PhilosophyRachel Carson’s Bittersweet Farewell to the World: Timeless Advice to the Next Generations from the Woman Who Catalyzed EnvironmentalBrain Pickings by Maria Popova - Maria Popova“Yours is a grave and sobering responsibility, but it is also a shining opportunity. You go out into a world where mankind is challenged, as it has never been challenged before, to prove its maturity its
Eleanor Roosevelt How Eleanor Roosevelt Revolutionized PoliticsBrain Pickings by Maria Popova - Maria Popova“Eleanor Roosevelt, lean and rangy, wore floral dresses and tucked flowers in the brim of floppy hats perched on top of her wavy hair, but she had a spine as stiff as the steel girder of a skyscraper.”
Philosophy Cosmic Consciousness: Maurice Bucke’s Pioneering 19th-Century Theory of Transcendence and the Six Steps of IlluminationBrain Pickings by Maria Popova - Maria PopovaWe 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.” “Our normal waking consciousness,” William James wrote
Philosophy The Power of Antagonistic Cooperation: Albert Murray on Heroism and How Storytelling Redeems Our Broken Cultural MythologyBrain Pickings by Maria Popova - Maria Popova“It is literature, in the primordial sense, which establishes the context for social and political action in the first place.” “A society must assume that it is stable, but the artist must know, and he
Philosophy Arthur Rackham’s Stunning 1926 Illustrations for “The Tempest”Brain Pickings by Maria Popova - Maria Popova“Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows.” In 1898, over a garden wall, Arthur Rackham (September 19, 1867–September 6, 1939) met the Irish portrait artist and sculptor Edyth Starkie, who encouraged
Philosophy Killed by Kindness: Virginia Woolf, the Art of Letters, the Birth and Death of Photography, and the Fate of Every TechnologyBrain Pickings by Maria Popova - Maria PopovaAn elegy for the triumph of commodity over creativity. At its dawn, every technology — like every new love — is aglow with the exhilaration of endless possibility. Its dark sides and eventual demise are
Philosophy The Universe in Verse 2018: Full ShowBrain Pickings by Maria Popova - Maria PopovaAn evening of poems celebrating science, read by beloved artists, writers, scientists, and musicians. In the spring of 2018, after the improbable success of the inaugural show in 2017, I once again joined
PhilosophyLove, Pain, and Growth: 19th-Century Philosopher, Poet, and Pioneering LGBT Rights Activist Edward Carpenter on How to SurviveBrain Pickings by Maria Popova - Maria Popova“Self-consciousness is fatal to love. The self-conscious lover never ‘arrives.’” “Loving anybody and being loved by anybody is a tremendous danger, a tremendous responsibility,” James Baldwin reflected
Philosophy Alain de Botton’s Lovely Letter to Children About Why We ReadBrain Pickings by Maria Popova - Maria Popova“We wouldn’t need books quite so much if everyone around us understood us well.” In a lovely aside in his revolutionary treatise dethroning Earth as the center of the universe, Galileo exulted in the of
Philosophy Lincoln on How to Handle CriticismBrain Pickings by Maria Popova - Maria Popova“If the end brings me out all right, what is said against me won’t amount to anything. If the end brings me out wrong, ten angels swearing I was right would make no difference.” On January 1, 1863, Abraham
Philosophy The Jazz of Physics: Cosmologist and Saxophonist Stephon Alexander on Decoding the Song of the UniverseBrain Pickings by Maria Popova - Maria Popova“It is less about music being scientific and more about the universe being musical.” “All truth is comprised in music and mathematics,” Margaret Fuller wrote as she was spearheading the Transcendentalist
Philosophy Advice on Writing from Emily Dickinson’s EditorBrain Pickings by Maria Popova - Maria Popova“Oftentimes a word shall speak what accumulated volumes have labored in vain to utter: there may be years of crowded passion in a word, and half a life in a sentence.” “You can never be sure / you die
Philosophy The Coming Victory of Democracy: Thomas Mann on Justice, Human Dignity, and the Need to Continually Renew Our IdealsBrain Pickings by Maria Popova - Maria Popova“To come close to art means to come close to life, and if an appreciation of the dignity of man is the moral definition of democracy, then its psychological definition arises out of its determination reconcile
Philosophy Crescendo: A Watercolor Ode to the Science, Strangeness, and Splendor of PregnancyBrain Pickings by Maria Popova - Maria PopovaFrom sesame seed to selfhood, a lyrical serenade to the astonishing process by which we all enter the world. “Every man or woman who is sane, every man or woman who has the feeling of being a person in
Creative Work Astrophysicist and Author Janna Levin Reads “Berryman” by W.S. Merwin: Superb Advice on How to Stay Sane as an ArtistBrain Pickings by Maria Popova - Maria PopovaTonic for living with that sacred, terrifying uncertainty with which all creative work enters the world. To be an artist is to live suspended above the abyss between recognition and artistic value, never
Art and the Nocturnal Imagination: Painter, Poet, and Philosopher Etel Adnan on Dreaming and CreativityBrain Pickings by Maria Popova - Maria Popova“The logic of dreams is superior to the one we exercise while awake. In dreams the mind at last finds its courage: it dares what we do not dare.” Nietzsche saw dreams as an evolutionary time machine for
Nobel-Winning Physicist Wolfgang Pauli on Science, Spirit, and Our Search for MeaningBrain Pickings by Maria Popova - Maria Popova“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
Philosophy Trailblazing 18th-Century Artist Sarah Stone’s Stunning Natural History Paintings of Exotic, Endangered, and Extinct SpeciesBrain Pickings by Maria Popova - Maria PopovaPotoroos, birds of paradise, variegated lizards, and other wondrous creatures brought to vibrant life by a visionary woman in the golden age of scientific exploration. A century before Peter Rabbit creator
These Truths: Jill Lepore on How the Shift from Mythology to Science Shaped the Early Dream of DemocracyBrain Pickings by Maria Popova - Maria Popova“The past is an inheritance, a gift and a burden. It can’t be shirked. You carry it everywhere. There’s nothing for it but to get to know it.” “Between those happenings that prefigure it / And those that
Over the Rooftops, Under the Moon: A Lyrical Illustrated Meditation on Loneliness, Otherness, and the Joy of Belonging FoundBrain Pickings by Maria Popova - Maria Popova“You can be far away inside, and far away outside.” “You can be lonely anywhere, but there is a particular flavour to the loneliness that comes from living in a city, surrounded by millions of people,”
The Source of Self-Regard: Toni Morrison on Wisdom in the Age of InformationBrain Pickings by Maria Popova - Maria Popova“We move from data to information to knowledge to wisdom. And separating one from the other… knowing the limitations and the danger of exercising one without the others, while respecting each category
Elizabeth Barrett Browning on Art as the Crucible of Progress and the Dangerous Cult of Blind Innovation, with Rare WoodcutsBrain Pickings by Maria Popova - Maria Popova“The contemplation of excellence produces excellence, if not similar, yet parallel.” In 1856, Elizabeth Barrett Browning (March 6, 1806–June 29, 1861) staggered the world with a sensation best described
Anne Gilchrist’s Beautiful and Heartbreaking Love Letters to Walt WhitmanBrain Pickings by Maria Popova - Maria Popova“Love & Hope are so strong in me, my soul’s high aspirations are of such tenacious, passionate intensity… that what would starve them out of any other woman only makes them strike out deeper roots, grow
15-Year-Old Susan Sontag on the Explosive Elasticity of the SelfBrain Pickings by Maria Popova - Maria Popova“All that animates me and is the original and responsive desire that constitutes my ‘self’ — all this takes on a definite shape and size — far too large to be contained by the structure I call my body.”
Harriet Hosmer on Art and Ambition: The World’s First Successful Woman Sculptor on What It Takes to Be a Great ArtistBrain Pickings by Maria Popova - Maria Popova“If one knew but one-half the difficulties an artist has to surmount… the public would be less ready to censure him for his shortcomings or slow advancement. The only remedy I know is patience with perseverance,
The Devil Teaches Thermodynamics: Sean Ono Lennon Reads Nobel-Winning Chemist and Poet Roald Hoffmann’s Ode to EntropyBrain Pickings by Maria Popova - Maria PopovaAn incantation to “join the imperfect universe at peace with the disorder that orders.” “We must be less than death to be lessened by it — for nothing is irrevocable but ourselves,” Emily Dickinson wrote
