The poorest way to face life is to face it with a sneer. There are many men who feel a kind of twister pride in cynicism; there are many who confine themselves to criticism of the way others do what they themselves dare not even attempt

There is nothing quite so tragic as a young cynic,” Maya Angelou wrote in contemplating courage in the face of evil, “because it means the person has gone from knowing nothing to believing nothing.”

To create today is to create dangerously… The question, for all those who cannot live without art and what it signifies, is merely to find out how, among the police forces of so many ideologies… the strange liberty of creation is possible

“Spontaneous activity is the one way in which man can overcome the terror of aloneness… for in the spontaneous realization of the self man unites himself anew with the world — with man, nature, and himself.”

“In the long run,” Eleanor Roosevelt wrote in considering how we bring about social change, “there is no more liberating, no more exhilarating experience than to determine one’s position, state it bravely, and then act boldly.” A generation after her, Albert Camus examined what it really means to be a rebel and asserted that the true rebel is not one who aims to destroy the existing order of things but one who “says yes and no simultaneously.” And yet the hardest project of self-actualization is that of discerning what to accept and what to reject — of the world and of ourselves — as we build the architecture of our character and stake out our stance in relation to our obstacles and aims.

“Is language the adequate expression of all realities?” Nietzsche asked in contemplating how we use language to both reveal and conceal reality.

In the 1970s, Dermisache invented an array of graphic languages, each with a distinct syntactic texture and a visual rhythm that inclines toward meaning, or the longing for meaning.

Out of such chaos, of such contradiction / We learn that we are neither devils nor divines

We could lament that the price we have paid for our so-called progress in the century and half since Muir has been a loss of perspective blinding us to this essential kinship with the rest of nature.

Still, something deep inside us — something elemental, beyond the ego and its conscious reasonings — vibrates with an irrepressible sense of our belonging to and with nature.

“I… a universe of atoms… an atom in the universe,” the Nobel-winning physicist Richard Feynman wrote in his lovely prose poem about evolution. “The fact that we are connected through space and time,” evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis observed of the interconnectedness of the universe, “shows that life is a unitary phenomenon, no matter how we express that fact.”

“If a man has any genuine talent he should be ready to make almost any sacrifice in order to cultivate it to the full.”

the four desires motivating all human behavior:

“Man differs from other animals in one very important respect, and that is that he has some desires which are, so to speak, infinite, which can never be fully gratified, and which would keep him restless even in Paradise. The boa constrictor, when he has had an adequate meal, goes to sleep, and does not wake until he needs another meal. Human beings, for the most part, are not like this.”

A spare and lovely ode to that which we so easily forget yet which animates the center of existence.

Metaphorical thinking is the wellspring of the human imagination — that virtuosic cognitive pivot of describing what a thing is through something it is not. “Everything which distinguishes man from the animals depends upon this ability to volatilize perceptual metaphors in a schema, and thus to dissolve an image into a concept,” Nietzsche proclaimed in his meditation on metaphor and reality.

Some of our mightiest metaphors draw on color to describe our perceptual and psychoemotional reality

unmistakable color in their mind’s eye

“It’s a mercy that time runs in one direction only, that we see the past but darkly and the future not at all.”

Of all the passions of which the human heart is susceptible, there is none which possesses so striking a character as the Love of Glory. The traces of its operations may be discovered in the primitive nature of man, but it is only in the midst of society that this sentiment acquires its true force.

According to that sublimity of virtue which seeks in our own conscience for the motive and the end of conduct, the love of glory is the most exalted principle which can actuate the soul.

Do you sometimes want to wake up to the singularity we once were?

what happens to a dying star as it collapses to form a singularity — that tiny point of zero radius, infinite density, and infinite curvature of spacetime at the heart of a black hole.

shaped the course of modern physics and changed our common understanding of why everything that is is

Abiding insight into the aim of human existence from the man who revolutionized science and coined the word “philosopher.”

Alongside his revolutionary science, Pythagoras coined the word philosopher to describe himself as a “lover of wisdom” — a love the subject of which he encapsulated in a short, insightful meditation on the uses of philosophy in human life.

From Newton to quantum physics to Hannah Arendt, a mind-bending, heart-opening invitation to welcome nature exactly as it is and ourselves exactly as we are.

At bottom the whole concern of both morality and religion is with the manner of our acceptance of the universe. Do we accept it only in part and grudgingly, or heartily and altogether

“I live my life with the idea that the universe can be described by a set of physical laws that are quantifiable and knowable, and that they apply anywhere in the universe, and that’s an assumption,” NASA astrophysicist Natalie Batalha — a modern-day Carl Sagan — reflected in our On Being conversation. Assumption is a species of belief, or rather the genome of all belief — which is why Sagan himself asserted in his superb meditation on science and religion, based on his 1985 Gifford Lectures in Scotland, that “if we ever reach the point where we think we thoroughly understand who we are and where we came from, we will have failed.”

A lyrical serenade to a world we barely dare imagine and to our kinship with those creatures most different from us

We don’t know where we belong, but in times of sorrow it doesn’t seem to be here… where space is curved, the earth is round, we’re all going to die, and it seems as wise to stay in bed as budge

How is it that, adrift amid a vast and unfeeling universe, we live with our sundering contradictions and still manage to constellate our lives with meaning, with beauty, with the transcendent possibility of belonging with each other and of homecoming to ourselves?

“Envy those who see beauty in everything in the world.”