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Dostoyevsky on What Makes a Good Person
We know good people when we encounter them, when they fall upon our lives like a sunbeam, like a song. But we don’t always know what makes them good. It has, of course, a lot to do with kindness. It...
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Against Brute Force: D.H. Lawrence on the Superpower of Vulnerability
“Brute force crushes many plants. Yet the plants rise again. The Pyramids will not last a moment compared with the daisy.” We live in a culture that has warped strength from the measure of our interior...
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The Dandelion and the Meaning of Life: G.K. Chesterton on How to Live in Wonder
Recovering the “forgotten blaze or burst of astonishment at our own existence” alive in the back of our modernity-deadened minds. There is a myth we live with, the myth of finding the meaning of life —...
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How Do You Know That You Love Somebody? Philosopher Martha Nussbaum’s...
“The alternations between love and its denial, suffering and denial of suffering … constitute the most essential and ubiquitous structural feature of the human heart.” “The state of enchantment is one...
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Ocean of Stars: A Painted Poem About How to Bear the Astonishment of Life
Here we are, bewildered miracles of chemistry and chance, trembling embers of dead stars capable of sign and song, a wild bet against probability that won. We have dreamt up origin myths and...
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The Common Language of Science: Einstein’s Clarion Call to Divided Humanity...
“Perfection of means and confusion of goals seem — in my opinion — to characterize our age.” What makes Albert Einstein (March 14, 1879–April 18, 1955) endure as “the quintessential modern genius”...
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How to Say “YES” to Your Life
It started with an urn for living gone wrong, the clay kiltering off center, resisting my every effort to force it back into shape. The harder I pushed to control it, the more it took on a life of its...
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Richard Dawkins on the Luckiness of Death
“The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia.” We are born into the certitude of our eventual death....
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James Baldwin’s Advice on Writing
“Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but most of all, endurance.” In 1989, Paris Review founding editor and...
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What Happens When We Die
“How can a creature who will certainly die have an understanding of things that will exist forever?” When my atheist engineer grandfather died, my atheist engineer grandmother leaned over the body in...
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David Bowie Answers the Famous Proust Questionnaire
“Q: What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery? A: Living in fear.” In the 1880s, long before he claimed his status as one of the greatest authors of all time, teenage Marcel Proust (July 10,...
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C.S. Lewis on How to Structure the Days of a Creative Life and Train the...
There are, in my experience, two fundaments of the creative life: putting yourself regularly in the path of wonder and getting out of your own way in order to receive what you encounter there. Wonder,...
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Inner Space, Outer Space, and How to Be an Astronaut in the Cosmos of...
“A star is the glowing light inside the other person, distantly seen, brave soul’s tiny flame, too bright to approach without great courage and integrity.” We move among surfaces. If we are lucky...
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Orcas and the Price of Consciousness: Lessons in Love and Loss from Earth’s...
Marbling the waters of every ocean with their billows of black and white, orcas are Earth’s most creative and most successful apex predator. Although they are known as killer whales, they are the...
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Bertrand Russell on the Secret of Happiness
“Let your interests be as wide as possible, and let your reactions to the things and persons that interest you be as far as possible friendly rather than hostile.” In my darkest hours, what has saved...
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The Weasel and the Meaning of It All: Annie Dillard on How to Live
Suppose we answer the most important question of existence in the affirmative. There is then only one question remaining: How shall we live this life? Despite all the technologies of thought and...
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Do Not Spare Yourself: An Antidote to Feeling Like You Are Waiting to Start...
The only thing more dangerous than wanting to save another person — a dangerous desire too often mistaken for love — is wanting to save yourself, to spare yourself the disappointment and heartbreak and...
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Hermann Hesse on Discovering the Soul Beneath the Self and the Key to Finding...
“Self-hate is really the same thing as sheer egoism, and in the long run breeds the same cruel isolation and despair.” “To be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to...
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How to Promise and How to Keep Promises from Breaking
We are creatures fragmentary but indivisible, each of us a whole that is always simpler than its parts, but complicated by the struggle for a living unison between them. Nothing betrays our partitions...
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J.R.R. Tolkien on How to Fall in Love with Life
In 1964, Pantheon Books invited J.R.R. Tolkien (January 3, 1892–September 2, 1973) to write an introduction to George MacDonald’s The Golden Key, which he had praised in Tree and Leaf — the small,...
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