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For Chinua Achebe's birthday, his forgotten, immensely timely conversation with Baldwin on the political power of art
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We lost Dr. Du Bois on this day in 1963. His little-known correspondence with Einstein about justice and equality
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Claude Shannon died on this day in 2001, having birthed the Information Age by inventing the bit
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“Love is the only way to rescue humanity from all ills.”
Tolstoy's forgotten correspondence with Gandhi
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“We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.”
31 years ago today, Elie Wiesel delivered his timeless, hugely timely Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech:
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“To see takes time, like to have a friend takes time.”
Georgia O'Keeffe on the art of seeing
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“The decline in adult literacy means not merely a decline in the capacity to read and write, but a decline in the impulse to puzzle out, brood upon…argue about, turn inside-out in verbal euphoria, the ‘incomparable medium’ of language…”
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“You are born alone. You die alone. The value of the space in between is trust and love.”
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Gabriel García Márquez’s formative reading list – 24 books that shaped one of humanity's greatest writers
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Roald Dahl, born 101 years ago today, on how illness emboldens creativity
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“To be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight.”
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“Future love does not exist. Love is a present activity only. The man who does not manifest love in the present has not love.”
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"Be a good steward of your gifts. Protect your time. Feed your inner life. Avoid too much noise. Read good books, have good sentences in your ears. Be by yourself as often as you can. Walk."
From poet Jane Kenyon, some mighty resolutions to live by:
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“Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire.”
Borges on time, a classic:
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“Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches,give alms to every one that asks…re-examine all you have been told…dismiss whatever insults your own soul…”
If you do one thing for yourself this
#NationalPoetryMonth
,read Whitman's Leaves of Grass
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"You are born alone. You die alone. The value of the space in between is trust and love."
Louise Bourgeois on how solitude enriches creative work:
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“Progress is never permanent, will always be threatened, must be redoubled, restated and reimagined if it is to survive.” Superb read:
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Seneca on the antidote to anxiety – the greatest Stoic of all time on how to attain lasting peace of mind:
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“Envy those who see beauty in everything in the world.”
Egon Schiele on what it means to be an artist and why visionaries tend to come from the minority:
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“I hold this to be the highest task of a bond between two people: that each should stand guard over the solitude of the other.”
Rilke, born on this day in 1875, on the difficult art of giving space in love
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Bob Dylan reads “‘Twas the Night Before Christmas”
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The psychology of writing and the cognitive science of the perfect daily routine
http://t.co/p41fAYEQu7
http://t.co/2RTdoRKYmZ
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“We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.”
Toni Morrison turns 87 today. When she became the first black woman to win a Nobel, she gave this remarkable acceptance speech on the power of language:
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"After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, love, and so on—have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear—what remains? Nature remains."
In times of human ugliness, solace in nature's impartial beauty:
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The irreplaceable
@BarackObama
turns 55 today. Here is what his mom taught him about love:
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"Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself… It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival."
Happy birthday, C.S. Lewis
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Tsundoku — Japanese for the guilt-pile of books you've bought but haven't yet read.
And other wonderful untranslatable words from around the world, illustrated:
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“Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.”
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“Practice kindness all day to everybody and you will realize you’re already in heaven now.” Christmas with Kerouac
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“If you can fall in love again and again… if you can forgive as well as forget, if you can keep from growing sour, surly, bitter and cynical… you’ve got it half licked.”
Happy birthday, Henry Miller
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“Make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life.”
Bertrand Russell, in one of the most read and shared Brain Pickings pieces this year:
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"Loneliness is difficult to confess; difficult too to categorise. Like depression, a state with which it often intersects, it can run deep in the fabric of a person."
Wonderful read:
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How to read intelligently and write a great essay – Robert Frost's wonderful letter of advice to his daughter
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Bruce Lee's never-before-revealed philosophical writings on willpower, emotion, reason, imagination, and confidence
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Marilyn Monroe died on this day in 1962 and left behind her beautiful unpublished poems – a rare glimpse of the private person behind the public persona
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“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.”
James Baldwin's advice on writing
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“The only people who can still strike us as normal are those we don’t yet know very well.”
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Anna Deavere Smith on confidence and what self-esteem really means
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“There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.”
Mobilizing wisdom for our cultural moment from Toni Morrison, who would've been 89 today:
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“The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.”
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“You are born alone. You die alone. The value of the space in between is trust and love.”
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Joan Didion, who turns 85 today, on learning not to mistake self-righteousness for morality – especially needed today, amid our social media era of violently wielded self-righteousnesses
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“We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.” Elie Wiesel, more than ever:
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“I hold this to be the highest task of a bond between two people: that each should stand guard over the solitude of the other.”
Rilke on the art of giving space in love and the secret to a good marriage:
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“We are never as kind as we want to be, but nothing outrages us more than people being unkind to us.”
Excellent read:
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Wabi-Sabi – an unusual children's book based on the Japanese philosophy of finding beauty in imperfection and consolation in impermanence
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“If you can fall in love again and again… if you can forgive as well as forget, if you can keep from growing sour, surly, bitter and cynical… you’ve got it half licked.”
Henry Miller, who died on this day in 1980, on what makes a life well lived:
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"we could wake up to what we were
— when we were ocean and before that
to when sky was earth, and animal was energy, and rock was
liquid and stars were space and space was not
at all — nothing...
before this awful loneliness."
Beyond beautiful:
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“Character — the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life — is the source from which self-respect springs.”
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“The more one does the more one can do.”
On this day in 1932, Amelia Earhart became the first woman to fly across the Atlantic. Her beautiful letters to her mother about human nature and motivation:
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“A person’s identity … is like a pattern drawn on a tightly stretched parchment. Touch just one part of it, just one allegiance, and the whole person will react, the whole drum will sound.”
Excellent read:
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Don’t worry about death, pay attention, read a lot, give up control, embrace imperfection — and other timeless lessons on living from proto-blogger Montaigne, born on this day in 1533
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“Creative people live in two worlds. One is the ordinary world... in which they are not in any special way set apart from their fellow men. The other is private and it is in this world that the creative acts take place.”
Mark Kac was born OTD in 1914
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“Truth always rests with the minority … because the minority is generally formed by those who really have an opinion, while the strength of a majority is illusory, formed by the gangs who have no opinion.”
Happy 205th, Kierkegaard:
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“We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.”
When Toni Morrison became the first black woman to win the Nobel Prize, she received it with this stunning speech on the power of language:
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For William Blake's birthday, his stunning illustrations for Milton's "Paradise Lost"
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No better way to celebrate
#InternationalWomensDay
than with Maya Angelou’s phenomenal reading of “Phenomenal Woman”
http://t.co/X2EhaxeOA9
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The word "scientist" was coined for a woman – the Scottish polymath Mary Somerville, born on this day in 1780
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“Grief is a force of energy that cannot be controlled or predicted. It comes and goes on its own schedule... Grief will do whatever it wants to you, whenever it wants to. In that regard, Grief has a lot in common with Love.”
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“If we are not regularly deeply embarrassed by who we are, the journey to self-knowledge hasn’t begun.” THIS:
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Dr. King would've been 88 today. May we heed, especially now, his wisdom on nonviolent resistance
#WritersResist
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For everybody who has ever lost anybody they loved, a beautiful anatomy of loss illustrated by Quentin Blake, who turns 91 today
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“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
A classic of courage and optimism, from a man who survived the worst:
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During humanity's darkest period, Camus wrote beautifully about how to rise above the despair—we need him so today
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“In 40 years of medical practice, I have found only two types of non-pharmaceutical ‘therapy’ to be vitally important for patients with chronic neurological diseases: music and gardens.”
Remembering Oliver Sacks, who returned to the soil 4 years ago today
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Happy birthday, Ella Fitzgerald! Celebrate the Fist Lady of Song with this lovely picture-book
http://t.co/89wvilXxu8
http://t.co/jp6luRPikf
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How to live with those who voted for Trump? Carl Sagan, who would've been 82 today, had some perfect wisdom:
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Neil Gaiman on Why We Read and What Books Do for the Human Experience: “Truth is not in what happens but in w...
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“Poetry can break open locked chambers of possibility, restore numbed zones to feeling, recharge desire.”
#NationalPoetryMonth
with Adrienne Rich:
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The greatest books of all time, as voted by 125 celebrated contemporary authors
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"(How frail the human heart must be —
a throbbing pulse, a trembling thing —
a fragile, shining instrument
of crystal, which can either weep,
or sing.)"
On Sylvia Plath's birthday, read her first tragic poem, with a touching remembrance by her mother:
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“Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
The story behind Dylan Thomas's "Do not go gentle into that good night" and the poet's own stirring reading of his beloved poem
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“We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.”
When Toni Morrison became the first African American woman to win the Nobel Prize, she gave this magnificent acceptance speech on the power of language:
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“Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terrors, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them.”
Happy birthday, Anaïs Nin:
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“Love the earth and sun and the animals… give alms to every one that asks… re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul…”
Whitman's timeless advice on living a vibrant and rewarding life:
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“Future love does not exist. Love is a present activity only. The man who does not manifest love in the present has not love.”
Tolstoy on the paradoxes and redemptions of love
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Bruce Springsteen's reading list – 28 favorite books that shaped his mind and music
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“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.”
James Baldwin's advice on writing (which applies, come to think of it, to so much in life):
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“We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.”
On this day in 1993, Toni Morrison became the first African American woman to win the Nobel. Her magnificent acceptance speech on the power of language:
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Rilke died on this day in 1926 and left us some of the finest, wisest advice on love you'll ever receive
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“Future love does not exist. Love is a present activity only. The man who does not manifest love in the present has not love.”
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Albert Camus (who died in a car crash with an unused train ticket in his pocket, after becoming the second-youngest Nobel laureate) on the 3 antidotes to the absurdity of life
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“Character — the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life — is the source from which self-respect springs.”
Joan Didion on self-respect — worth re-reading every few months for basic psychological hygiene:
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"Everything flows, an old Greek said.
Nothing’s secure...
On your way up, show consideration
To the ones you meet on their way down.
The Latin root of condescension
Means we all sink."
Happy birthday, Seamus Heaney
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“In the depths of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.”
Albert Camus – born on this day in 1913, into one World War, to live through another – on strength through difficult times
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“Science describes accurately from outside, poetry describes accurately from inside. Science explicates, poetry implicates. Both celebrate what they describe.”
Viva Le Guin
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"After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, love, and so on — have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear — what remains? Nature remains."
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“Think not you can direct the course of love, for love, if it finds you worthy, directs your course.”
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“True solitude is found in the wild places, where one is without human obligation. One’s inner voices become audible… In consequence, one responds more clearly to other lives.”
Wonderful Wendell Berry read:
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Kubrick on mortality, his fear of flying, and the meaning of life
http://t.co/JqHqQm9NsG
http://t.co/IcByw3Q2XK
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“To be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight.”
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“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.”
Advice on writing from James Baldwin, born on this day in 1924:
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A lesser-known loveliness about Stephen Hawking: He once co-wrote a children's book about time travel with his daughter
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"I love to be silent with you, Mary."
The love letters of Kahlil Gibran
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James Baldwin on how we imprison ourselves, the role of the writer, and what freedom really means—superb read
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“You are born alone. You die alone. The value of the space in between is trust and love.”
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Ursula K. Le Guin on the sacredness of public libraries
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“Man cannot stand a meaningless life.”
Carl Jung, born on this day in 1875, on human nature in a rare BBC interview:
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"The world is violent and mercurial — it will have its way with you. We are saved only by love — love for each other and the love that we pour into the art we feel compelled to share: being a parent; being a writer; being a painter; being a friend."
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Remembering Leonard Cohen with his unpublished, astonishingly prescient verses on democracy and its redemption
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