“Happiness is a very proud word of our whole cultural heritage,” Erich From said in a rare 1958 interview. “If you would ask people what their concept of Heaven is, and if they were honest, they would say it’s a kind of big department store with new things every week, and enough money to buy … Read more

“In one of the episodes of On Being, the climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe told a story that may resonate with many of us who feel helpless in the face of the environmental crisis facing our shared home, “I was talking with a pastor [in Texas] just recently, and he asked me very genuinely, ‘How do … Read more

“Men seek retreats for themselves, houses in the country, sea-shores, and mountains,” Marcus Aurelius wrote in his Meditations. “But this is altogether a mark of the most common sort of men, for it is in thy power whenever thou shalt choose to retire into thyself.” Two millennia later, Fernando Pessoa (June 13, 1888–November 30, 1935) … Read more

“A human being is a part of the whole, called by us ‘Universe,’ a part limited in time and space,” Albert Einstein wrote in a beautiful letter of consolation to a grieving father. “He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest—a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. The striving … Read more