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 …
From Marcus Aurelius to Einstein, poets and philosophers on the deepest wellspring of our humanity. …
“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.” …
“A caterpillar sees itself shrivel up, but doesn’t see the butterfly which flies out of it.” …
A lovely reminder that “kindness and kin have the same mother.” …
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. …
Love, poetry, friendship, solitude, and lots of trees. …
“Nothing can make our life, or the lives of other people, more beautiful than perpetual kindness.” …