“Think not you can direct the course of love, for love, if it finds you worthy, directs your course.”

“All things are so very uncertain, and that’s exactly what makes me feel reassured,” one of the Moomins observes in Tove Jansson’s masterwork of philosophy disguised as a children…

The great cruelty of life, and also its great mercy, is that only hindsight ever knows each last — the last time your lover put their hand on the small of your back, the last sip of the last …

“There is but one solution to the intricate riddle of life; to improve ourselves, and contribute to the happiness of others.”

ALT: Release The Imposter Files - Politics Epstein

Few things in life are more exasperating than seeing the potential in someone you love and seeing them continually fall short of it, stumbling again and again over the same self-erected roadblocks …

How, knowing that even the universe is dying, do we bear our lives? Most readily, through friendship, through connection, through co-creating the world we want to live in for the brief time we have…

“One discovers the light in darkness, that is what darkness is for; but everything in our lives depends on how we bear the light,” James Baldwin wrote in one of his finest, least known …

“The real significance of our problem with time… is a crisis of meaning… The root of our modern problem with time is neither technological, sociological, economic nor psychologica…

We are hunter-gatherers with a capacity for amazement, wired to search for an organizing principle by which to contain the chaos of reality. We organize what we find into categories and hierarchies…

For all the enchantment the color blue has cast upon humanity, no animal has fallen under its spell more hopelessly than the bowerbird, whose very survival hinges on blue. In a small clearing on th…

You wouldn’t have bet on it, the frail famous poet teaching at Harvard as a visiting professor and the athletic secretary of the campus residence half her age. But every great love exists aga…

“To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance… To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what…

Once, I spent a year walking Brooklyn’s historic Green-Wood Cemetery daily, winding between the marble tombs engulfed by tree-roots and emblazoned with the surnames of the dead, each followed…

Recovering the “forgotten blaze or burst of astonishment at our own existence” alive in the back of our modernity-deadened minds.

Enchantment, J.R.R. Tolkien believed, is “as necessary for the health and complete functioning of the Human as is sunlight for physical life.” But enchantment is a story we tell ourselv…

“Andersen had the courage to write stories with unhappy endings. He didn’t believe that you should try to be good because it pays … but because evil stems from intellectual and emotiona…