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A bite-sized Tumblr companion to @brainpickings by @brainpicker .
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Maya Angelou died 3 years ago today and once wrote this beautiful letter of life-advice to her younger self
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“If you write what you yourself sincerely think and feel and are interested in… you will interest other people.”
Rachel Carson – the marine biologist who catalyzed the environmental movement and wrote like a poet – on the loneliness of creative work
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The Third Self – poet Mary Oliver on concentration, the artist's task, and the central commitment of creative work
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Pure cosmic awe: A multiple-camera, 360-degree timelapse planetary panorama of the night sky
http://t.co/qZOv9njvvC
http://t.co/HDFDKqDuMM
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"Fantasy is a natural human activity. It certainly does not destroy or even insult Reason... On the contrary. The keener and the clearer is the reason, the better fantasy will it make."
Happy birthday, Tolkien
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"Knowing and understanding are different." The paradox of unlearning
http://t.co/v4BUfTH4NP
http://t.co/0KIWoTmi4o
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“Life loves the liver of it. You must live and life will be good to you.” We lost Maya Angelou 3 years ago today
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Schopenhauer wrote beautifully about the essential difference between how art and science reveal the world:
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Isaac Asimov on the meaning of life, in a comic
http://t.co/Y1hXOhuTc4
http://t.co/x619q1e1hz
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Beloved Lebanese-American poet, philosopher, and artist Kahlil Gibran on the absurdity of righteousness
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"your life is your life
don’t let it be clubbed into dank submission.
be on the watch.
there are ways out."
Priceless: Tom Waits reads "The Laughing Heart" by Charles Bukowski, born on this day in 1920
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From Rilke, born on this day in 1875, perhaps the wisest thing ever written about what it means to be an artist
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“The truth is, most of us discover where we are headed when we arrive.”
Advice on life and creative integrity from Calvin and Hobbes creator Bill Watterson
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“Practice kindness all day to everybody and you will realize you’re already in heaven now.”
Jack Kerouac on kindness and the self illusion – a beautiful letter to his first wife and lifelong friend:
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Bruce Lee died on this day in 1973. In his final year, he wrote this remarkable letter about the measure of success
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"We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda; it is a form of truth.”
From JFK, one of the greatest, truest speeches ever given:
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A Stoic's key to peace of mind – arm yourself for the holiday with Seneca's antidote to anxiety
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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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The jarring "humanity i love you" by E.E. Cummings, read by
@amandapalmer
, seems perfect right about now
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"The best culture will always be that of … courageous instincts, and loving perceptions, and of self-respect."
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Priceless: Young Terry Gilliam teaches you how to make his unique cut-out stop-motion animations in 1974 TV segment
http://t.co/7M61x2oY8H
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E.E. Cummings, born on this day in 1894, on what it takes to be an artist — his magnificent forgotten prose:
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Information theory pioneer Claude Shannon died on this day in 2001. The fascinating story of how he invented the bit
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On this day in 1959, pioneering physicist Lise Meitner delivered her sobering address on women in science
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For Stephen Hawking's birthday, his theory of how the universe works, animated in 150 seconds
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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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Maria Mitchell & the Spider's Web—lovely testament to the power of perseverance by America's first woman astronomer
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"We saw to the edge of all there is —
So brutal and alive it seemed to comprehend us back."
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“Be curious. Read widely. Try new things. What people call intelligence just boils down to curiosity.” Aaron Swartz
http://t.co/psfW3dFf
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The editors of
@parisreview
on what's wrong with creative writing programs
http://t.co/QGJarVhQeR
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How much saner our world would be if Carl Sagan's "baloney detection kit" were made required reading for all humans
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"If emotion without reason is blind, then reason without emotion is impotent."
http://t.co/aQ1oqh1d
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Kandinsky on the spiritual element in art and the 3 responsibilities of artists
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"If the universe is meaningless, so is the statement that it is so… The meaning and purpose of dancing is the dance.”
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“To be nobody-but-yourself ... means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight.”
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“Old friends cannot be created out of hand. Nothing can match the treasure of common memories, of trials endured together, of quarrels and reconciliations and generous emotions.”
Little Prince author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry on losing a friend:
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As
#WomensHistoryMonth
wraps up, an illustrated celebration of trailblazing women in science
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"Marriage requires a constant rhythm of adaptation between two people who are changing.” Wonderful thought:
http://t.co/8p3qsi0FeN
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“We hear and apprehend only what we already half know.”
Thoreau, born 202 years ago today, on seeing vs. knowing and what it takes to really apprehend reality unblinded by our preconceptions
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“Poetry can break open locked chambers of possibility, restore numbed zones to feeling, recharge desire.”
#WorldPoetryDay
with Adrienne Rich
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"What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness." George Saunders's superb Syracuse commencement address
http://t.co/WWwm3RrK2u
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“We made the world we’re living in and we have to make it over.” Baldwin, needed as ever, died on this day in 1987
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“Education is what someone tells you to do and learning is what you do for yourself.”
@mikekarnj
#penny2012
http://t.co/YF3GDzly
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The science of stress and how our emotions affect our susceptibility to burnout and disease
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"God, or no God? … Any proof, either way? None, except for Bach, foxes, forgiveness.”
@ANNELAMOTT
, brilliant as ever:
http://t.co/mXsPltuBve
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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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“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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Happy 83rd, Wole Soyinka! The first African writer to win the Nobel Prize on the healing of the human spirit
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David Foster Wallace on why you must use a dictionary, how to write a great opener, and the measure of good writing
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Jane Goodall arrived in Gombe on this day in 1960 to begin her revolutionary work.Her inspiring life-story, animated
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“Knowledge sets us free, art sets us free. A great library is freedom.”
Ursula K. Le Guin, who would've been 89 today, on the sacredness of public libraries:
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Always a good time for Carl Sagan's timeless toolkit for critical thinking and BS-detection
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The psychology of writing and the cognitive science of the daily routine most ideal for creative work
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The great Simone de Beauvoir, born on this day in 1908, on how we become who we are
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“Luxury, to me, is not owning a lot of stuff. Luxury, to me, is feeling unrushed.” YES
http://t.co/VobnD6Wphz
http://t.co/TpTnPYD75d
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The illustrated story of how child inventor Louis Braille, born on this day in 1809, changed the world with his language for the blind
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The breathtaking love letters of Violet Trefusis and Vita Sackville-West (who later became Virginia Woolf's lover)
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“There is nothing quite so tragic as a young cynic, because it means the person has gone from knowing nothing to believing nothing.”
Remembering Maya Angelou, who died 4 years ago today:
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Richard Feynman, who died on this day in 1988, on the meaning of life
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Charles Schulz was born on this day in 1922. Here is the story of his underappreciated civil rights advocacy
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“If your fidelity to perfectionism is too high, you never do anything.”
David Foster Wallace on the double-edged sword of ambition:
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“Everything that is important and valuable and good belongs with the little piece of us which is not mechanical.”
Iris Murdoch, born 100 years ago today, on love and chance
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For Chinua Achebe's birthday, his forgotten conversation with James Baldwin about the political power of art
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Treat yourself to
@CultureBrain
's fantastic
#CreativeMornings
talk on designing your own success
http://t.co/SVGiQmTb
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The postcards Picasso illustrated and sent to Jean Cocteau, Apollinaire, and Gertrude Stein
http://t.co/gAipiDUC97
http://t.co/Yce2VIbtIP
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“However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light.” Kubrick, who would've been 89 today, on life
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"We love to contemplate blue—not because it advances to us, but because it draws us after it."
A posy of blue from some of the most beautiful literature of the past 200 years: Goethe, Thoreau, Morrison, Solnit, Woolf, O'Keeffe, Nabokov, and more:
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"Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light."
On Dylan Thomas's birthday, the story behind his iconic poem and a rare recording of the poet himself reading it:
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Peek inside Guillermo del Toro’s sketchbooks – a glimpse of a creative mind at its wildest
http://t.co/9uInKFr3vU
http://t.co/rxLElZSoCO
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John Steinbeck on good and evil, the necessary contradictions of human nature, and our grounds for lucid hope
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"Knowing and understanding are different." The paradox of unlearning
http://t.co/NbuEtNwCpJ
http://t.co/m9kbRUSRF3
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"Take a notebook and notice every time you get excited about something." Fantastic advice on forging your path
http://t.co/34kToEU1pD
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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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“I am bombarded yet I stand.” For Adrienne Rich's birthday, her poem "Planetarium"—gorgeous ode to women in science
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Bruce Lee would've been 76 today. Here are his never-before-seen writings on willpower, emotion, and confidence
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“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.”
Oliver Sacks, born on this day in 1933, on the 3 essential elements of creativity:
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"NASA scientists found that people who take vacations experience an 82%increase in job performance upon their return"
http://t.co/OlI6hQHvGO
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“One of the functions of art is to give people the words to know their own experience… Storytelling is a tool for knowing who we are and what we want.”
Ursula K. Le Guin on art, storytelling, and the power of language to transform and redeem
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Tsundoku – Japanese for "leaving a book unread after buying it, typically piled up together with other unread books"
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"If you don’t contradict yourself on a regular basis, then you’re not thinking." A thousand times YES
http://t.co/v7vT8TOMkx
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On
#InternationalWomensDay
, meet mathematician Mary Somerville — the woman for whom the word "scientist" was coined
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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 on how to grow old:
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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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“Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted.”
Long before the the social web, Susan Sontag, born on this day in 1933, presaged so much of today:
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I love that the Japanese have a word for the pile of books bought but unread
http://t.co/HLx7pUHYBf
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Susan Sontag had a radical and quite brilliant vision for reimagining education — no school between ages 12 and 16, then go back to school for those extra four years at 50
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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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Neil deGrasse Tyson, who turns 59 today, recommends 8 books every intelligent person should read
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"Centre of equal daughters, equal sons...
Perennial with the Earth, with Freedom, Law and Love..."
Walt Whitman reads his poem "America" — the only surviving recording of his voice:
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"Seeing someone reading a book you love is seeing a book recommending a person."Best saying ever or best saying ever?
http://t.co/LSb4zIFsyR
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When asked what books every intelligent person on the planet should read, Neil deGrasse Tyson recommended these 8:
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“All creative art is magic, is evocation of the unseen in forms persuasive, enlightening, familiar and surprising, for the edification of mankind.”
Happy birthday, Joseph Conrad
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