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Necessary Losses: The Life-Shaping Art of Letting Go

The Meaning of Maturity: Ursula K. Le Guin on What It Really Takes to Grow Up

Dostoyevsky, Just After His Death Sentence Was Repealed, on the Meaning of Life

Oliver Sacks on the Necessity of Our Illusions

What Makes a Person: The Seven Layers of Selfhood in Literature and Life

Simone de Beauvoir on How Chance and Choice Converge to Make Us Who We Are

How to Live Fully: The Samurai Guide to Dying Every Day

How to Be More Alive: Hermann Hesse on Wonder and the Proper Aim of Education

A Spell Against Stagnation: John O’Donohue on Beginnings

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

Nick Cave on the Two Pillars of a Meaningful Life

The Story Behind Dylan Thomas’s “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night” and the Poet’s Own Stirring Reading of His Masterpiece

How Not to Waste Your Life

Hope Is the Thing with Feathers, and with Fangs: The Alchemy of Unrequited Love and the Story Behind Emily Dickinson’s Most Famous Poem

How to See a Bird: Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris’s Exquisite Illustrated Field Guide to the Wonder of the Winged

Poet and Philosopher David Whyte on Anger, Forgiveness, and What Maturity Really Means

How to Survive Hopelessness: The Remarkable Story of a Shipwrecked Family

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

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

Robert Louis Stevenson on Falling in Love and Loving Beyond the Fall

The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows: Uncommonly Lovely Invented Words for What We Feel but Cannot Name

Ursula K. Le Guin on the Meaning of Life

J.R.R. Tolkien on Fairy Tales, Language, the Psychology of Fantasy, and Why There’s No Such Thing as Writing “For Children”

How Nature Imagined the Figment of You

How to Keep Life from Becoming a Parody of Itself: Simone de Beauvoir on the Art of Growing Older

A Shelter in Time: John Berger on the Power of Music

Very Necessary Qualifications of a Great Storyteller

Leonard Cohen on the Antidote to Anger and the Meaning of Resistance

Einstein and the Eagle: How Relativity Is Saving Earth’s Rarest Raptor

The Three Elements of the Good Life

An Introvert’s Field Guide to Friendship: Thoreau on the Challenges and Rewards of Candid Connection

Václav Havel, Writing from Prison, on How to Hold Your Failure

The Only Three Distinctions Between People

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

Music, the Neural Harmonics of Emotion, and How Love Recomposes the Brain

How Phrenology Queered Language: Walt Whitman and the Evolving Lexicon of Love

Artist Louise Bourgeois on How Solitude Enriches Creative Work

The Donkey and the Meaning of Eternity: Nobel-Winning Spanish Poet Juan Ramón Jiménez’s Love Letter to Life

Curiosity as an Instrument of Love: Thoreau’s Touching Account of 24 Hours with a Tiny Owl

Hermann Hesse on How to Hear the Wisdom of the Inner Voice

Albert Camus on the Three Antidotes to the Absurdity of Life

Existentialist Embroidery

Oliver Sacks on Memory, Originality, and Why Forgetting is Necessary for Creativity

Moonlight and the Magic of the Unnecessary

Swimming and the Meaning of Life

How to Live Fully: Ursula K. Le Guin’s Remedy for Our Resistance to Change

The Log from the Sea of Cortez: John Steinbeck’s Forgotten Masterpiece on How to Think and the Art of Seeing the Pattern Beyond the Particular

How Not to Dwell on the Past

How Evolution Invented Faith: The Patience of the Penguin and the Art of Withstanding Abandonment

Truth, Fact, and the Patterning of Reality: Virginia Woolf on How We Come to Know the World