Brain Pickings

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19 SEPTEMBER, 2014

John Dewey on the True Purpose of Education and How to Harness the Power of Our Natural Curiosity

“While it is not the business of education … to teach every possible item of information, it is its business to cultivate deep-seated and effective habits of discriminating tested beliefs from mere assertions, guesses, and opinions.”

16 SEPTEMBER, 2014

The Life of the Mind: Hannah Arendt on Thinking vs. Knowing and the Crucial Difference Between Truth and Meaning

“To lose the appetite for meaning we call thinking and cease to ask unanswerable questions [is to] lose not only the ability to produce those thought-things that we call works of art but also the capacity to ask all the answerable questions upon which every civilization is founded.”

15 SEPTEMBER, 2014

Sam Harris on Spirituality without Religion, Happiness, and How to Cultivate the Art of Presence

“Our world is dangerously riven by religious doctrines that all educated people should condemn, and yet there is more to understanding the human condition than science and secular culture generally admit.”

08 SEPTEMBER, 2014

Incomparable Things Said Incomparably Well: Emerson’s Extraordinary Letter of Appreciation to Young Walt Whitman

“I rubbed my eyes a little, to see if this sunbeam were no illusion.”