by Maria Popova "Writing is hard for every last one of us... Coal mining is harder. Do you think miners stand around all day talking about how hard it is to mine for coal? They do not. They simply dig." "Nothing any good isn't hard," F.
by Maria Popova Wisdom on overcoming the greatest human frustration from the pioneer of Eastern philosophy in the West. "How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives," Annie Dillard wrote in her timeless reflection on presence over productivity - a timely antidote to the central anxiety of our productivity-obsessed age.
by Maria Popova "You have to learn to recognize your own depth." In 1985, mythologist and writer Joseph John Campbell (March 26, 1904-October 30, 1987) sat down with legendary interviewer and idea-monger Bill Moyers for a lengthy conversation at George Lucas's Skywalker Ranch in California, which continued the following year at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.
by Maria Popova "If we take man as he really is, we make him worse. But if we overestimate him ... we promote him to what he really can be." Austrian psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl (March 26, 1905-September 2, 1997) is a timeless testament to the luminous tenacity of the human spirit.
Here's how We believe that we should work to be happy, but could that be backwards? In this fast-moving and entertaining talk, psychologist Shawn Achor argues that actually happiness inspires productivity. (Filmed at TEDxBloomington.) This talk was presented to a local audience at TEDxBloomington, an independent event.
by Maria Popova "It is not necessary to accept the choices handed down to you by life as you know it." As a hopeless lover of both letters and famous advice, I was delighted to discover a letter 20-year-old Hunter S.
by Maria Popova "Live as if you were living already for the second time and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now!"
by Maria Popova "The dream of a house can be the eternally postponed preliminary step to taking up the lives we wish we were living." Despite being a longtime believer in and reaper of the benefits of meditation, I only recently attended my first meditation retreat - and found myself confronting a strange disconnect.
by Maria Popova "An artist needs a certain amount of turmoil and confusion." It's paradoxical that while "art holds out the promise of inner wholeness" for those who experience it, the relationship between creativity and mental illness is well-documented among those who make it, as is the anguish of artists who experience it.
by Maria Popova "Our stories give shape to our inchoate, disparate, fleeting impressions of everyday life." "I pray to Jesus to preserve my sanity," Jack Kerouac professed in discussing his writing routine. But those of us who fall on the more secular end of the spectrum might need a slightly more potent sanity-preservation tool than prayer.
