6 Aug,2022 | Brain Pickings, Personal Development
Sometimes, a painting in words is worth a thousand pictures. I think about this more and more, in our compulsively visual culture, which increasingly reduces what we think and feel and see — who and what we are — to what can be photographed. I think of...
5 Aug,2022 | Brain Pickings, Personal Development
“Metaphor can create a merciful sense of distance from the cruel idea, or the unspeakable truth, and allow it to exist within us as a kind of poetic radiance, as a work of art.” “Once a poem is made available to the public, the right of interpretation...
4 Aug,2022 | Brain Pickings, Personal Development
“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?” asks the poetic physicist and scientific novelist Alan...
3 Aug,2022 | Brain Pickings, Personal Development
“…greener than grass I am and dead — or almost I seem to me.” Jealousy may be the most staggering scale discrepancy of the inner world — an enormous all-consuming emotion pinched into extreme smallness of spirit. It is also one of the most...
2 Aug,2022 | Brain Pickings, Personal Development
“I shall not take what is not given. I shall not harm what does not harm me. The only footprints I shall leave are those that will wash away.” Looking back on his long and luminous life at age ninety-three, the great cellist Pablo Casals held up one great...
31 Jul,2022 | Brain Pickings, Personal Development
“When you surrender, the problem ceases to exist. Try to solve it, or conquer it, and you only set up more resistance.” “Letting art is the paradox of active surrender,” Jeanette Winterson wrote in her superb meditation on how art transforms...
