“When we really know something we feel we’ve always known it. Yet also it’s terribly distant, farther than any star… beyond the world, not in the clouds or in heaven, but a light that shows the world, this world, as it really is.” When Nietzsche weighed our human notion of truth, he regarded it as […]
Aristotle, Alice, and a back flap. “What is essential is invisible to the eye,” Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote as he contemplated the meaning of life in one of humanity’s greatest works of philosophy disguised as a children’s book. The challenge, of course, is that what is essential — about the totality of life, as about […]
“Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you. Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.” This is the sixth of nine installments in the animated interlude season of The Universe in Verse in collaboration with On Being, celebrating the wonder of reality through stories of science winged with poetry. See the rest here. THE […]
“The way things were, the way we made things, it turns out, none of it was inevitable — none of it is the way things have to be.” “Beauty is truth, truth beauty, — that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know,” Keats wrote in the closing lines of his […]
“By reaching beyond the brain… we are able to focus more intently, comprehend more deeply, and create more imaginatively — to entertain ideas that would be literally unthinkable by the brain alone.” “Our minds are all threaded together,” the young Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary at the dawn of the twentieth century, “and all […]
A lyrical reminder that our terror and our tenderness spring from the same source. “If you want your children to be intelligent,” Einstein is said to have said, “read them fairy tales. If you want them to be very intelligent, read them more fairy tales.” But fairy tales also make us, children and grown children […]
Enlarge / Ryan North, creator of Dinosaur Comics, offers a step-by-step guide to becoming the next Lex Luthor in his new book, How To Take Over the World: Practical Schemes and Scientific Solutions for the Aspiring Supervillain. (credit: Ryan North, tweaked by Aurich Lawson) Are you a fan of superhero comics who identifies more with […]
“We share in the slow optimistic tendency of the universe… We have life and health and wholeness on the same terms as the trees, the flowers, the grass, the animals have, and pay the same price for our well-being, in struggle and effort, that they pay. That is our good fortune.” In those seasons of […]
“We share in the slow optimistic tendency of the universe… We have life and health and wholeness on the same terms as the trees, the flowers, the grass, the animals have, and pay the same price for our well-being, in struggle and effort, that they pay. That is our good fortune.” In those seasons of […]
A 90-second revelation in the heart, from humanity at its most purehearted. “What is essential in the future is that every member of the family, even little children, should learn at whatever cost not to give way to wrong or to co-operate in it,” the pioneering X-ray crystallographer and Quaker peace activist Kathleen Lonsdale wrote […]