Andy Warhol on Beauty
“I’ve never met a person I couldn’t call a beauty,” Andy Warhol writes in The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again): Every person has beauty at some point in …
Philosophy
Ben Horowitz: The Struggle
In The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers, Ben Horowitz describes the struggle. Every entrepreneur starts her company with a clear vision for success. You …
The Art of Stillness
“Sitting still,” writes Pico Iyer in The Art of Stillness: Adventures in Going Nowhere, is “a way of falling in love with the world and everything in it.” The Art of Stillness …
Vincent van Gogh Writes a Letter on the Three Stages of Love
In a letter to his brother Theo, dated Thursday, 3 November 1881, found in Ever Yours: The Essential Letters, Vincent van Gogh describes an unreciprocated love and in so doing alludes to three stages …
Marcus Aurelius: You Have One Life To Live
The excerpt is from this version online, although if you’re going to read it, get the Hayes translation. Our mental powers should enable us to perceive the swiftness with which all things vanish …
Andy Warhol on Love and Sex
“People should fall in love with their eyes closed. Just close your eyes. Don’t look.” *** Pop art luminary Andy Warhol had a lot to say about love and sex. As found in the wonderful …
Vincent van Gogh on the Two Types of Idlers
The anthology Ever Yours: The Essential Letters, contains 265 of Vincent van Gogh’s letters, which is nearly a third of all the surviving letters he penned. In a long and winding letter to his brother …
Frederick W. Taylor: Time Management Skills
“There is no question that the tendency of the average man (in all walks of life) is toward working at a slow, easy gait, and that it is only after a good deal of thought and observation on his …
The Books That Influenced Edward O. Wilson
Too often life gets in the way of reading and thinking. Rarely are we given a chance to look back at what influenced our thinking. Sometimes these are small fragments — words, thoughts, marginalia, …
The Internet’s Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz
Two years ago today, internet activist Aaron Swartz took his own life. At the time, Swartz was in the midst of being prosecuted for downloading academic journal articles. While 27 at the time of his …
Vincent van Gogh on How To Live
Van Gogh didn’t become popular until shortly after his death. To this day it’s unclear whether his letters drove the initial interest in his art. The anthology Ever Yours: The Essential …
Bruce Lee on Self Regulation versus External Regulation
Bruce Lee the philosopher brought us some insightful comments on self-actualization. Now he’s back with more goodness. In Bruce Lee: Artist of Life, Lee talks about the curative power of …
Bruce Lee on Self-Actualization
Recently on Reddit, Bruce Lee’s daughter, Shannon, did an ask me anything. One of the questions caught my attention: … of all your father’s philosophies, which do you feel we can all …
Building a Business and Making Your Mark
Building the perfect business is about finding the balance between what you have to offer and what the world wants. In this post, we hear from Sebastian Thrun, co-founder of Udacity, about some of the …
Andy Warhol on Loneliness
In his pseudo-memoir, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again), which is more a collection of his thoughts on various subjects, Andy Warhol writes about the paradox of getting what …
Tiny Beautiful Things
On March 11, 2010, a new writer took over “Dear Sugar,” an advice column on the Web site the Rumpus. Things would never be the same. Slowly over the next two years, we learned a little more about her …