Articles by Maria Popova
We found 387 results.
16 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.
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The 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.”
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The 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.”
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Every 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…”
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Beloved 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.
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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.”
→ 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.
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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.”
→ 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.”
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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.”
→ read full articleNature 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.”
→ read full articleGardening 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.”
→ read full articleYes 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.”
→ read full articleConsolation 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.”
→ read full articleWhat 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.
→ read full articleThe 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.”
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.”
→ read full articleMaya 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?”
→ read full articleThe 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.”
→ read full article13 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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