Leo Tolstoy

Maira Kalman on How to Live with Remorse and Wrest from It Defiant Joy in Living

Each time we have tried to elevate ourselves above the other animals by claiming singular possession of some faculty, we have been humbled otherwise: Language, it turns out, is not ours alone, nor is the use of tools, nor is music. Elephants grieve, octopuses remember and predict, crows hold grudges. Perhaps one day this too will be snatched from us, but for now there seems to be one tumult of being pulsating in the human breast alone: the capacity to be sorry, to feel the soul-ache of remorse as the penitent past fangs the flesh of the present. How to… read article …

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2,000 Years of Kindness

From Marcus Aurelius to Einstein, poets and philosophers on the deepest wellspring of our humanity. …

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Leo Tolstoy on the Obsolescence of the State as a Form of Government and the Antidote to Violence

“Violence no longer rests on the belief in its utility, but only on the fact of its having existed so long, and being organized by the ruling classes who profit by it.” …

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Life and Death and More Life: Leo Tolstoy on Science, Spirituality, and Our Search for Meaning

“A caterpillar sees itself shrivel up, but doesn’t see the butterfly which flies out of it.” …

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Carrots and the Roots of Kindness

A lovely reminder that “kindness and kin have the same mother.” …

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Resolutions for a Life Worth Living: Attainable Aspirations Inspired by Great Humans of the Past

Life-tested wisdom on how to live from James Baldwin, Ursula K. Le Guin, Leo Tolstoy, Seneca, Toni Morrison, Walt Whitman, Viktor Frankl, Rachel Carson, and Hannah Arendt. …

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The Best of Brain Pickings 2019

Love, poetry, friendship, solitude, and lots of trees. …

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Leo Tolstoy on Kindness and the Measure of Love

“Nothing can make our life, or the lives of other people, more beautiful than perpetual kindness.” …

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