The Best of Brain Pickings

“We cannot deeply love anything without becoming vulnerable to loss. And we cannot become separate people, responsible people, connected people, reflective people without some losing and leav…

“Cultivating a questioning mind, of which conversation is the chief instrument, enriches our relationship with the world.”

Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf, Oliver Sacks, Rebecca Solnit, Bronson Alcott, Michael Pollan, Jamaica Kincaid, and more.

«The first pure joy of the garden… weeding all day to finish the beds in a queer sort of enthusiasm which made me say this is happiness.»

“In any art you’re allowed to steal anything if you can make it better.”

“Out of the cradle onto the dry land… here it is standing… atoms with consciousness… matter with curiosity… I… a universe of atoms… an atom in the universe…

“We’ve barely begun to understand our place in the cosmos. As we continue to look out from our planet and contemplate the nature of reality, we should remember that there is a mystery right h…

«Humanity is young, and we’ve barely begun to understand our place in the cosmos. As we continue to look out from our planet and contemplate the nature of reality, we should remember that there is a mystery right here where we stand.»

“Fill yourself with the beautiful stuff of the world… Get amazed. Get astonished. Get awed on a regular basis, so that getting awed is habitual and becomes a state of being.”

«Fill yourself with the beautiful stuff of the world. Have fun. Get amazed. Get astonished. Get awed on a regular basis, so that getting awed is habitual and becomes a state of being»

“Our first questions about the value of a book, of a human being, or a musical composition are: Can they walk? Even more, can they dance?”

«Our first questions about the value of a book, of a human being, or a musical composition are: Can they walk? Even more, can they dance?»

“Let your interests be as wide as possible, and let your reactions to the things and persons that interest you be as far as possible friendly rather than hostile.”

«The attainment of happiness is then less a matter of pursuit than of surrender — to the world’s wonder, ready as it comes.»

“What is happiness but growth in peace.”

«For what is happiness but growth in peace, The timeless sense of time when furniture Has stood a life’s span in a single place, And as the air moves, so the old dreams stir The shining leaves of present happiness? No one has heard thought or listened to a mind, But where people have lived in inwardness The air is charged with blessing and does bless;»

“Contemplating the teeming life of the shore, we have an uneasy sense of the communication of some universal truth that lies just beyond our grasp… the ultimate mystery of Life itself.&…

“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… livi…

«Annie Dillard captured this sentiment best in her haunting observation that “how we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives”»

Facing the logical fallacies that fuel painful emotional patterns and what it takes to break them with dignity, mindfulness, and emotional maturity.

«While the death of a loved one can make the notion of moving on unfathomable at first, it also makes it, by definition, inevitable — there is no other recourse, for such loss is unambiguous and irreversible.»

Life-tested wisdom on how to live from James Baldwin, Ursula K. Le Guin, Leo Tolstoy, Seneca, Toni Morrison, Walt Whitman, Viktor Frankl, Rachel Carson, and Hannah Arendt.

«You should respond with kindness toward evil done to you, and you will destroy in an evil person that pleasure which he derives from evil.»

“To despair over oneself, in despair to want to be rid of oneself, is the formula for all despair.”

“Never, in peace or war, commit your virtue or your happiness to the future… The present is the only time in which any duty can be done or any grace received.”

“…for every book contains a world.”

“A caterpillar sees itself shrivel up, but doesn’t see the butterfly which flies out of it.”

«Tolstoy writes in his: I’m beginning to get used to regarding death and dying not as the end of my task, but as the task itself.»

“I think of good love as something that roots, not rots, over time, and of the hyphae that are weaving through the ground below me, reaching out through the soil in search of mergings.”

“To live, we must die every instant. We must perish again and again in the storms that make life possible.”

An ancient antidote to our greatest vulnerability from the great Buddhist teacher and Zen elder Thich Nhat Hanh.

“Self-knowledge… is not an aim in itself, but a means of liberating the forces of spontaneous growth. In this sense, to work at ourselves becomes not only the prime moral obligation, bu…

«under the forces of convention and compulsion; it requires living amicably with who we have been in order to fully live into who we can be.»

How to fine-tune the internal monologue that scores every aspect of our lives, from leadership to love.

“These days, you see a kid lying on his back and looking blank and you begin to wonder what’s wrong with him. There’s nothing wrong with him, except he’s thinking… He is trying to arriv…

“Every jealous person knows jealousy to be a brutally degrading experience and resists with all his might revealing the extent of his degradation.”

«the glorification of a despotic»

How a confused romancer that survived the Ice Age became a tropical sensation and took over the world.