“It’s part of being human to fall short of that total acceptance and ultimate understanding — and often far short.”

“Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.”

In 1896, decades before Santiago Ramón y Cajal pioneered neuroscience, more than a century before Oliver Sacks showed us how perception phosphoresces in the 100 milliseconds between the world and u…

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…

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

“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…

We know good people when we encounter them, when they fall upon our lives like a sunbeam, like a song. But we don’t always know what makes them good. It has, of course, a lot to do with kindn…

“There are more things … likely to frighten us than there are to crush us; we suffer more often in imagination than in reality.”

We are shaped by all we have suffered — by what harrows us — and in turn shape our lives by how we hold our harrowing. Harrow shares its Middle English root with harvest. It is by suffe…

Four billion years ago, in the hydrothermal vents at the bottom of the world where serpentine is forged, chemistry trembled with the promise of consciousness and matter began its long metabolic pil…

Language is the chalice we lift to our lips to taste our own experience — a vessel that constrains what it contains by giving it its own shape. The more complex our experience, the more muddl…

“Brute force crushes many plants. Yet the plants rise again. The Pyramids will not last a moment compared with the daisy.”

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

We spend our days making plans, making promises, making predictions about the possible, and yet the most bewildering thing about life is that its imagination is always greater than that of the livi…

“The mind narrates what the nervous system knows. Story follows state.”

“The main thing is this — when you get up in the morning you must take your heart in your two hands. You must do this every morning.”

“Nothing like this has ever happened before or will ever happen again,” a friend said to me about a lucky turn of events — a statement that struck me as touchingly self-negating: …

“Of all the parts of your body, be most vigilant over your index finger, for it is blame-thirsty. A pointed finger is a victim’s logo.”

“Beyond the difficulty of communicating oneself, there is the supreme difficulty of being oneself.”

“I have always felt that a human being could only be saved by another human being. I am aware that we do not save each other very often. But I am also aware that we save each other some of th…

Exploring the intersection of time and decision-making to shine a light on what it means to be human.

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

Here we are, bewildered miracles of chemistry and chance, trembling embers of dead stars capable of sign and song, a wild bet against probability that won. We have dreamt up origin myths and cosmol…

“All things are so very uncertain, and that’s exactly what makes me feel reassured,” Tove Jansson wrote in one of our civilization’s great works of philosophy disguised as a child…

How to nurture a love that “would stand as a firm wall,” that “won’t let you fall, and it gives warmth.”

“Perfection of means and confusion of goals seem — in my opinion — to characterize our age.”

“The alternations between love and its denial, suffering and denial of suffering … constitute the most essential and ubiquitous structural feature of the human heart.”

A story of transmuting the grief of one life into a celebration of the grandeur of Life.

“Sit. Feast on your life.”

“All your sorrows have been wasted on you if you have not yet learned how to be wretched.”

It started with an urn for living gone wrong, the clay kiltering off center, resisting my every effort to force it back into shape. The harder I pushed to control it, the more it took on a life of …

“It’s terribly dangerous for an artist to fulfill other people’s expectations”

“The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia.”

“Beyond the difficulty of communicating oneself, there is the supreme difficulty of being oneself.”

“We reach forth and strain every nerve, but we seize only a bit of the curtain that hides the infinite from us.”

“Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but most of all, endurance.”

“Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination…”

Every night, for every human being that ever was and ever will be, the Moon rises to remind us how improbably lucky we are, each of its craters a monument of the odds we prevailed against to exist,…

When I was a child, little delighted me more than the magical green garlands draping from the pine trees, which I made into wreaths and mustaches to roam the mountains of Bulgaria as a miniature Or…

The great paradox of human life is that our mortality is the fulcrum of our search for meaning — the yearning to make this brief lungful of life matter amid the breathless void of space and t…

There are, in my experience, two fundaments of the creative life: putting yourself regularly in the path of wonder and getting out of your own way in order to receive what you encounter there. Wond…

“Let me not seem to have lived in vain,” the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe whispered on his deathbed, not realizing that the astronomical tables he was leaving behind would become the p…

“How can a creature who will certainly die have an understanding of things that will exist forever?”