The Best of Brain Pickings

“Can you plant a garden to stop a war? It depends how you think about time. It depends what you think a seed does, if it’s tossed into fertile soil.”

“To create today is to create dangerously… The question, for all those who cannot live without art and what it signifies, is merely to find out how, among the police forces of so many i…

An elegy for the triumph of commodity over creativity.

“The life of sensation is the life of greed; it requires more and more. The life of the spirit requires less and less.”

“It takes a special energy, over and above one’s creative potential, a special audacity or subversiveness, to strike out in a new direction once one is settled.”

«“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.”»

“It is very important to be in love with life… Life is very fragile and always elusive. As soon as we think we ‘understand,’ there is another mystery. I don’t understand any…

I met Willow at a loom on a farm one late-summer day. She was amused that I thought she looked like Mary Shelley, in whose world I’d been immersed for seven years while writing Traversal. Nei…

“Out of the cradle onto the dry land… here it is standing… atoms with consciousness… matter with curiosity… I… a universe of atoms… an atom in the universe…

“We’ve barely begun to understand our place in the cosmos. As we continue to look out from our planet and contemplate the nature of reality, we should remember that there is a mystery right h…

«Humanity is young, and we’ve barely begun to understand our place in the cosmos. As we continue to look out from our planet and contemplate the nature of reality, we should remember that there is a mystery right here where we stand.»

The most paradoxical thing about creative work is that it is both a way in and a way out, that it plunges you into the depths of your being and at the same time takes you out of yourself. Writing i…

“Fill yourself with the beautiful stuff of the world… Get amazed. Get astonished. Get awed on a regular basis, so that getting awed is habitual and becomes a state of being.”

«Fill yourself with the beautiful stuff of the world. Have fun. Get amazed. Get astonished. Get awed on a regular basis, so that getting awed is habitual and becomes a state of being»

A look into “the very heart of nature’s double nature.”

«time is the substance we are made of, Pollan considers time as the tendril by which flowers»

“Contemplating the teeming life of the shore, we have an uneasy sense of the communication of some universal truth that lies just beyond our grasp… the ultimate mystery of Life itself.&…

Shared by 379, including Charles Duhigg, debbie millman

«If we are lucky enough, if we are alive enough, we go on making art, making meaning, making an effort to “leave something of sweetness and substance in the mouth of the world.”»

Soulful sylvan consolation partway between David Byrne, Bill T. Jones, and the Buddha.

“Our task at midlife is to be strong enough to relinquish the ego-urgencies of the first half and open ourselves to a greater wonder.”

«“In the middle of the journey of our life I found myself within a dark woods where the straight way was lost,” Dante wrote in the Inferno.»

“Every thing that lives is holy, life delights in life,” William Blake wrote in an era when science first began raising questions with spiritual undertones: What is life? Where does it …

“What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery?” asked the Proust Questionnaire. “Living in fear,” answered David Bowie. The most menacing word of the three is the smalle…

“Never, in peace or war, commit your virtue or your happiness to the future… The present is the only time in which any duty can be done or any grace received.”

“Self-knowledge… is not an aim in itself, but a means of liberating the forces of spontaneous growth. In this sense, to work at ourselves becomes not only the prime moral obligation, bu…

«under the forces of convention and compulsion; it requires living amicably with who we have been in order to fully live into who we can be.»

“The meaning of life… clearly has to do with love — what and whom and how one can love.”

«Meaning is not something we find — it is something we make, and the puzzle pieces are often the fragments of our shattered hopes and dreams.»

“Care and responsibility are constituent elements of love, but without respect for and knowledge of the beloved person, love deteriorates into domination and possessiveness.”

“The mind narrates what the nervous system knows. Story follows state.”

«Co-regulation is at the heart of positive relationships… If we miss opportunities to co-regulate in childhood, we feel that loss in our adult relationships.»

“A caterpillar sees itself shrivel up, but doesn’t see the butterfly which flies out of it.”

«Tolstoy writes in his: I’m beginning to get used to regarding death and dying not as the end of my task, but as the task itself.»

“I think of good love as something that roots, not rots, over time, and of the hyphae that are weaving through the ground below me, reaching out through the soil in search of mergings.”

“To live, we must die every instant. We must perish again and again in the storms that make life possible.”

An ancient antidote to our greatest vulnerability from the great Buddhist teacher and Zen elder Thich Nhat Hanh.

How to fine-tune the internal monologue that scores every aspect of our lives, from leadership to love.

“These days, you see a kid lying on his back and looking blank and you begin to wonder what’s wrong with him. There’s nothing wrong with him, except he’s thinking… He is trying to arriv…

“Death is self-surrender… Love is the consciousness of survival in the act of self-surrender.”

«love, which is at bottom “the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real»

The point, of course, is to make yourself alive — to feel the force of being in your sinew and your spirit, to tremble with the beauty and the terror of it all, to breathe lungfuls of life th…

«Even in the most dreary situation you keep your eyes on where you want to be.»

“Our first questions about the value of a book, of a human being, or a musical composition are: Can they walk? Even more, can they dance?”

«Our first questions about the value of a book, of a human being, or a musical composition are: Can they walk? Even more, can they dance?»