Search results for “optimism”
Alan Lightman on the Longing for Absolutes in a Relative World and What Gives Lasting Meaning to Our Lives
“We are idealists and we are realists. We are dreamers and we are builders. We are experiencers and we are experimenters. We long for certainties, yet we ourselves are full of the ambiguities of the Mona Lisa and the I Ching. We ourselves are a part of the yin-yang of the world.”
Zadie Smith on What Writers Can Learn from Some of History’s Greatest Dancers
“Between propriety and joy choose joy.”
Nobel-Winning Physicist Niels Bohr on Subjective vs. Objective Reality and the Uses of Religion in a Secular World
“The fact that religions through the ages have spoken in images, parables, and paradoxes means simply that there are no other ways of grasping the reality to which they refer. But that does not mean that it is not a genuine reality. And splitting this reality into an objective and a subjective side won’t get us very far.”
Technology, Wisdom, and the Difficult Art of Civilizational Self-Awareness: Thomas Merton’s Beautiful Letter of Appreciation to Rachel Carson for Catalyzing the Environmental Movement
“Technics and wisdom are not by any means opposed. On the contrary, the duty of our age… is to unite them in a supreme humility which will result in a totally self-forgetful creativity and service.”
Take Fate by the Throat: Beethoven on Creative Vitality and Resilience in the Face of Suffering
“Day by day I am approaching the goal which I apprehend but cannot describe.”
Nietzsche on Truth, Lies, the Power and Peril of Metaphor, and How We Use Language to Reveal and Conceal Reality
“What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished…”
Neither Victims Nor Executioners: Albert Camus on the Antidote to Violence
“If he who bases his hopes on human nature is a fool, he who gives up in the face of circumstances is a coward.”
A Winter Walk with Thoreau: The Transcendentalist Way of Finding Inner Warmth in the Cold Season
“Take long walks in stormy weather or through deep snows in the fields and woods, if you would keep your spirits up. Deal with brute nature. Be cold and hungry and weary.”
The Universe in Verse
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