21 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...
24 Jun,2022 | Brain Pickings, Personal Development
“Judgements on people are never final, they emerge from summings up which at once suggest the need of a reconsideration. Human arrangements are nothing but loose ends and hazy reckoning.” In literature, when a storyline involves victim and a persecutor, we...
28 May,2022 | Brain Pickings, Personal Development
“Freedom is our ability to rise out of history and grasp a universal idea of order which we then apply to the sensible world.” “Nothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom,” James Baldwin wrote in one of the greatest novels of the twentieth...
30 Mar,2022 | Brain Pickings, Personal Development
“When we really know something we feel we’ve always known it. Yet also it’s terribly distant, farther than any star… beyond the world, not in the clouds or in heaven, but a light that shows the world, this world, as it really is.” When Nietzsche weighed...
8 Jan,2022 | Brain Pickings, Personal Development
“Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real.” Decades into his long life, the poet Robert Graves defined love as “a recognition of another person’s integrity and truth in a way that… makes both of you...
