The Paradox of Knowing Who You Are and What You Want: Cristina Campo on Fairy Tales, Time, and the Meaning of Maturity

What a Weasel Knows That We Forget: Annie Dillard on How to Live

The Pain in You and the God in You: Carl Jung on the Relationship Between Psychological Suffering and Creativity

Pablo Neruda on How to Hold Time

Escaping the Trap of Efficiency: The Counterintuitive Antidote to the Time-Anxiety That Haunts and Hampers Our Search for Meaning

Borges on How to Conquer Time

The Figments of Love and the Hallucinations of Reason

The New Science of Plant Intelligence and the Mystery of What Makes a Mind

Grace Paley on the Art of Growing Older

How Should You Live Your Life: Marie Howe’s Spare, Stunning Poem “The Maples”

A Lighthouse for Dark Times

Against Self-Criticism: Adam Phillips on How Our Internal Critics Enslave Us, the Stockholm Syndrome of the Superego, and the Power of Multiple Interpretations

Don’t Heed the Haters: Albert Einstein’s Wonderful Letter of Support to Marie Curie in the Midst of Scandal

Trauma, Growth, and How to Be Twice as Alive: Tove Jansson on the Worm and the Art of Self-Renewal

The Birth of Photography and the Death of Letters: Virginia Woolf on the Fate of Every Technology

Fanny Wright and the Radical Courage of Being Real: The Forgotten Woman Who Pioneered Scientific Thinking and Free Love in America

The Vampire Problem: The Paradoxical Psychology of Why It Is So Hard to Change

The Courage to Be Yourself: E.E. Cummings on Art, Life, and Being Unafraid to Feel

How to Live a Miraculous Life: Brian Doyle on Love, Humility, and the Quiet Grace of the Possible

What It Takes to Grow: Pioneering Psychoanalyst Karen Horney on the Key to Self-Realization

How to Get Over Someone: Help for Heartbreak from the Evolutionary History of Hiccups

Is There a God? Stephen Hawking Gives the Definitive Answer to the Eternal Question

Do the Next Right Thing: Carl Jung on How to Live and the Origin of His Famous Tenet for Navigating Uncertainty

The Third Self: Mary Oliver on Creativity and Time

Wait: Galway Kinnell’s Beautiful and Life-Giving Poem for a Young Friend Contemplating Suicide

The Gentle Giant: Oliver Sacks and the Art of Choosing Empathy Over Vengeance

Music and the Body: Richard Powers on the Power of Song

A Cosmic Pastoral: Diane Ackerman on the Intimate in the Infinite and the Responsibility of Rapture

The Parts We Live With: D.H. Lawrence and the Yearning for Living Unison

Moonlight and the Magic of the Unnecessary

How to Grow Old: Bertrand Russell on What Makes a Fulfilling Life

Tim Ferriss on How He Survived Suicidal Depression and His Tools for Warding Off the Darkness

Orcas and the Price of Consciousness: Lessons in Love and Loss from Earth’s Most Successful and Creative Predator

The Seamstress Who Solved the Ancient Mystery of the Argonaut, Pioneered the Aquarium, and Laid the Groundwork for the Study of Octopus Intelligence

James Baldwin on How to Live Through Your Darkest Hour and Life as a Moral Obligation to the Universe

Dostoyevsky on Why There Are No Bad People

The Mattering Instinct

Emily Dickinson’s Electric Love Letters to Susan Gilbert

Arundhati Roy on the Deepest Measure of Success

The Three Elements of the Good Life

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Pioneering Psychiatrist Donald Winnicott on the Qualities of a Healthy Mind and a Healthy Relationship

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How to Stop Waiting and Start Living: A Jolt from Henry James

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Seneca on Grief and the Key to Resilience in the Face of Loss: An Extraordinary Letter to His Mother

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How Do You Know That You Love Somebody? Philosopher Martha Nussbaum’s Incompleteness Theorem of the Heart’s Truth, from Plato to Proust

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From the Labor Camp to the Literary Canon: How Dostoyevsky Became a Writer

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Walt Whitman’s Advice on Living a Vibrant and Rewarding Life

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