“Hope is not an inclination or an emotion; it’s a duty.”—Susan Neiman in the latest issue of The New York Review of Books.

“A `private psychic reality’ is eclipsing what used to be known as the `public world stage,’ " Richard Sennett wrote back in 1974 in The Fall of Public Man. Fifty-one years on, it begins to look like a full eclipse.

“Pardon our progress,” says the inadvertently wise sign next to a broken elevator in a small hotel in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania.

If our thoughts about events are the least important thing in the world, our feelings about them are surely the second least important.

"Notice what happens if you replace judgment with curiosity"--Carol Gilligan, on receiving the Kyoto Prize, November 10, 2025.

“Our people have forgotten,” noted the wise and often prophetic Henry Adams, more than a century ago, “that any world exists outside America and their heads are excessively swollen.”

“In proportion as our inner life fails,” Thoreau pointed out, more than 150 years ago, “we go more constantly and desperately to the post-office.” Or simply check our messages.

The greatest truth of mindfulness: “It was one thing to instruct the mind; it was another to make the mind obey”—Admiral Byrd, alone in a shack near the South Pole, realizing that transformation comes only through difficulty and pain.

We have to accept that sometimes it’s only by stepping away from the world physically that we can draw closer to it emotionally and in some deeper way.

“Long before the ice rolls back,” wrote Admiral Byrd in 1937, “excursion boats will be streaming down from Sandy Hook and every moraine {in Antarctica} will have its tourist hotel.”

These days it’s assumed that emotion is the best way to seize or to hold attention. But true attention is the state that exists beyond emotion.

If Bangkok fell for Dharamsala, their offspring might well be called Ubud.

It's only by doing nothing that we can do anything constructive or considered at all.

Isn’t life a question we have no need to answer? Indeed, the more we try to answer it, the more vexed we will become.

“The world is far too complex...for a solution," Leonard Cohen pointed out, back in 2006. "This is not the realm of solutions.” Perhaps, rather, it's the realm of finding ways to live with calm and clarity in the absence of final answers.

To be part of a group and to feel at home may be very different things; to be welcomed and to wish to join are never quite the same, even if our emotions sometimes tempt us to elide the difference between them.

“It is the things you can’t do anything about that do something with you and to you." More quotable wisdom from the fountain of such, Richard Rohr.

"I was 12 the last time I saw my mother," says the engaging Tibetan artist in front of me. "You haven't seen her for 30 years?" A nod. "We're grateful for WeChat." Another too typical story from the Tibet Fund's annual gala.

There are 50,000 dams within the Yangtze catchment, and the Three Gorges Dam project has measurably slowed the rotation of the earth. Look to the exemplary Robert Macfarlane to learn about the world with both flair and brilliance.

Hitler and Wittgenstein were in the same school in Linz, just two years apart: one of the most evil men of the century, and one of the most high-minded. Circumstances don’t explain everything.