27 Jan,2023 | Brain Pickings, Personal Development
“The gifts of the inner world must be accepted as gifts in the outer world if they are to retain their vitality.” It is a gladness to be able to call one’s daily work a labor of love, and to have that labor put food on the table the way any work...
26 Jan,2023 | Brain Pickings, Personal Development
“Intelligence is not something which exists, but something one does.” “Intelligence supposes good will,” Simone de Beauvoir wrote. “Sensitivity is nothing else but the presence which is attentive to the world and to itself.” Yet our...
25 Jan,2023 | Brain Pickings, Personal Development
On remaining in loving contact with the intangible, immutable part of the self. One of the hardest things in life is watching a loved one’s mind slowly syphoned by cognitive illness — that haunting ambiguous loss of the familiar body remaining, but the...
23 Jan,2023 | Brain Pickings, Personal Development
A vibrant foray into “a perfect world of wonders” fueled by the bittersweet dimension of life. Marianne North (October 24, 1830–August 30, 1890) was twenty-six and had just lost her mother to a long tortuous illness when her father took her to an...
22 Jan,2023 | Brain Pickings, Personal Development
“Everything we do matters, and matters wondrously.” There is a peculiar existential loneliness that entombs us whenever we lose our sense of connection to the web of being — the self begins to feel like a twig torn from the tree of life, and...
21 Jan,2023 | Brain Pickings, Personal Development
“Great genial power… consists… in being altogether receptive.” The best things in life we don’t choose — they choose us. A great love, a great calling, a great illumination — they happen unto us, like light falling upon that...
