4 Oct,2022 | Brain Pickings, Personal Development
“A person who is lucidly aware of the miracles that surround him, who has learned to bear up under the loneliness, has made quite a bit of progress on the road to wisdom.” “If you write what you yourself sincerely think and feel and are interested...
9 Sep,2022 | Brain Pickings, Personal Development
“Science has come up against many mysteries, but few have proven as intractable and difficult to solve as the eel.” No one knows why they go the way they go, which is always one way, or how they get there, which is not really a there, for the Sargasso Sea...
2 Jan,2022 | Brain Pickings, Personal Development
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. If we abide by the common definition of philosophy as the love of wisdom, and if Montaigne was...
8 Jun,2021 | Brain Pickings, Personal Development
This essay is adapted from Figuring. In June of 1952, the United States Fish & Wildlife Service received a letter of resignation from its most famous marine biologist. On the line requesting the reason for resignation, she had stated plainly: “To devote my time to...
21 Jan,2021 | Brain Pickings, Personal Development
I noticed them first in my neighborhood — dots of paint hovering over the grate of the storm drain in a blue-green spectrum punctuated by white. I noticed them probably because I had been writing about the wondrous science of the color blue and my brain had formed, as...
