The Best of Brain Pickings

“Creative fantasy, because it is mainly trying to do something else (make something new), may open your hoard and let all the locked things fly away like cage-birds.”

A simple perspective shift that reorients the roots of being.

“I armed myself with patience and courage, and only after several months managed to dissolve my doubts and see my research crowned with happy confirmation.”

Stepping up to the subtle gestures that can redeem a day, or a life.

“Hope is a diagnostic human trait, and this simple cortex symptom seems to be a prime factor in our inspection of our universe.”

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.»

“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?»

“Your imagination… is mostly an accidental dance between collected memory and influence… a construction that awaits spiritual ignition.”

«Nothing is original because everything is an influence; everything is original because no influence makes its way into our art untransmuted by our imagination»

“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.&…

Shared by 269, including Charles Duhigg, debbie millman

«If we are lucky enough, if we are alive enough, we go on making art, making meaning, making an effort to “leave something of sweetness and substance in the mouth of the world.”»

Soulful sylvan consolation partway between David Byrne, Bill T. Jones, and the Buddha.

“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.»

“Communing with God is communing with our own hearts, our own best selves, not with something foreign and accidental. Saints and devotees have gone into the wilderness to find God; of course …

«The beauty of natural religion is that you have it all the time; you do not have to seek it afar off in myths and legends»

“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.

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

“It wouldn’t have been failure to be bankrupt, dishonoured, pilloried, hanged; it was failure not to be anything.”

«“The things we want are transformative, and we don’t know or only think we know what is on the other side of that transformation,” Rebecca Solnit wrote in her exquisite Field Guide to Getting Lost.»

“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…

“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.”

“Playing music is the brain’s equivalent of a full-body workout.”

«Playing music is the brain’s equivalent of a full-body workout… Playing an instrument engages practically every area of the brain at once — especially the visual, auditory, and motor cortices.»