the art of this modern ice age (at 116 Montague)
“Everyone has inside of him a piece of good news. The good news is that you don’t know how great you can be! How much you can love! What you can accomplish! And what your potential is!”
Timeless truth from Anne Frank, hand-lettered by Lisa Congdon – who does that sort of thing with unequaled brilliance.
No one’s fated or doomed to love anyone… The accidents happen.
—Adrienne Rich on love, loss, creative process, and public vs. private happiness (via explore-blog)
(Source: , via explore-blog)
Wherever your life ends, it is all there. The utility of living consists not in the length of days, but in the use of time; a man may have lived long, and yet lived but a little. Make use of time while it is present with you. It depends upon your will, and not upon the number of days, to have a sufficient length of life.
—Montaigne on death and the art of living – half a millennium later, still an indispensable read. (via explore-blog)
(Source: , via explore-blog)
Mindfulness may have a prophylactic effect: it can strengthen the areas that are most susceptible to cognitive decline. When we learn to unitask, to think more in line with Holmes’s detached approach, we may be doing more than increasing our observational prowess. We may be investing in a sounder mental future — no matter how old we are.
—Maria Konnikova, author of Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes, on the power of concentration and what we can learn from Sherlock Holmes. (via explore-blog)
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Gratitude can have such a powerful impact on your life because it engages your brain in a virtuous cycle. Your brain only has so much power to focus its attention. It cannot easily focus on both positive and negative stimuli. It is like a small child: easily distracted. Oh your tummy hurts? Here’s a lollipop. So you lost your job? Isn’t it wonderful we’re having KFC for dinner? On top of that your brain loves to fall for the confirmation bias, that is it looks for things that prove what it already believes to be true. And the dopamine reinforces that as well. So once you start seeing things to be grateful for, your brain starts looking for more things to be grateful for. That’s how the virtuous cycle gets created.
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The Grateful Brain – Alex Korb takes a look at recent research exploring our neural reward circuits. Also see the hard-wired limits of the human brain and complement with some famous thoughts on gratitude.
(Source: , via explore-blog)
Love always returns us to what we do and do not know. We have no other choice than to become shaken by doubt, and to persist with what we can know when we can know it.
—Philosopher Judith Butler on the value of doubting love (via explore-blog)
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Anaïs Nin on love, hand-lettered by Debbie Millman – hardly gets better than this. Available as a limited-edition print benefiting A Room of Her Own, a foundation supporting women artists and writers.
the art of prep(ared)
the art of mean mugs
the art of scratchy patchwork
the art of sweaters
(via psych-facts)
Love is not a state, a feeling, a disposition, but an exchange, uneven, fraught with history, with ghosts, with longings that are more or less legible to those who try to see one another with their own faulty vision.
—Philosopher Judith Butler on doubting love (via explore-blog)
(Source: , via explore-blog)
