Search results for “Thoreau”
Beyond the Blues: Poet Mary Ruefle’s Stunning Color Spectrum of Sadnesses
“Pink sadness… is the sadness of shame when you have done nothing wrong, pink sadness is not your fault, and though even the littlest twinge may cause it, it is the vast bushy top on the family tree of sadness, whose faraway roots resemble a colossal squid with eyes the size of soccer balls.”
Wendell Berry on Delight as a Force of Resistance to Consumerism, the Key to Mirth Under Hardship, and the Measure of a Rich Life
“The essential cultural discrimination is not between having and not having or haves and have-nots, but between the superfluous and the indispensable. Wisdom… is always poised upon the knowledge of minimums; it might be thought to be the art of minimums.”
Shelley on Poetry and the Art of Seeing
“Poetry… reproduces the common universe of which we are portions and percipients, and it purges from our inward sight the film of familiarity which obscures from us the wonder of our being.”
Trees at Night: Stunning Rorschach Silhouettes from the 1920s
“Aside from the appearance of a tree by day or night, is it not kin of the human family with its roots in the earth and its arms stretching toward the sky as if to seek and to know the great mystery?”
How John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor’s Pioneering Intimate Partnership of Equals Shaped the Building Blocks of Social Equality and Liberty for the Modern World
“Compromise is not a sign of the collapse of one’s moral conscience. It is a sign of its strength, for there is nothing more necessary to a moral conscience than the recognition that other people have one, too. A compromise is a knot tied tight between competing decencies.”
Stillness as a Form of Action: De Tocqueville on Cataclysm as an Antidote to Cultural Complacency and a Catalyst for Growth
“There are periods during which human society seems to rest… This pause is, indeed, only apparent, for time does not stop its course for nations any more than for [individuals]; they are all advancing every day towards a goal with which they are unacquainted.”
13 Life-Learnings from 13 Years of Brain Pickings
More fluid reflections on keeping a solid center.
Through the First Antarctic Night: A Pioneering Polar Explorer on the Resilience of the Human Spirit
“There was a naked fierceness in the scenes, a boisterous wildness in the storms, a sublimity and silence in the still, cold dayless nights, which were too impressive to be entirely overshadowed by the soul-despairing depression.”
The Antidote to Prejudice: Walter Lippmann on Overriding the Mind’s Propensity for Preconceptions
“There is a taint on any contact between two people which does not affirm as an axiom the personal inviolability of both.”
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