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February 2026
Feb 10
What We Agree To
William James,
The Principles of Psychology
Millions of items of the outward order are present to my senses which never properly enter into my e...
Feb 9
Your Plot of Ground
Ralph Waldo Emerson,
Self-Reliance
There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; t...
Feb 8
The Thing Not Named
Willa Cather,
The Novel Démeublé
Whatever is felt upon the page without being specifically named there—that, it seems to me, is creat...
Feb 7
The Poetic Faculty
Henry David Thoreau,
Walden
There is some of the same fitness in a man's building his own house that there is in a bird's buildi...
Feb 6
What the Scythe Whispers
Robert Frost,
A Boy's Will
There was never a sound beside the wood but one,
Feb 5
Something Helpless
Rainer Maria Rilke,
Letters to a Young Poet
We have no reason to harbor any mistrust against our world, for it is not against us. If it has terr...
Feb 4
A Single Taste
Friedrich Nietzsche,
The Gay Science
One thing is needful.— To 'give style' to one's character—a great and rare art! It is practiced by t...
Feb 3
The Semblance of Truth
Plato,
Phaedrus
The story goes that Theuth was the inventor of many arts, and he went to the great king Thamus and s...
Feb 2
What We Owe the Dead
T.S. Eliot,
Tradition and the Individual Talent
No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is...
Feb 1
Remaining in Uncertainties
John Keats,
Letter to George and Tom Keats
I had not a dispute but a disquisition with Dilke, on various subjects; several things dovetailed in...
January 2026
Jan 31
Signs of Life
John Ruskin,
The Stones of Venice
Imperfection is in some sort essential to all that we know of life. It is the sign of life in a mort...
Jan 30
The By-Product
Robert Henri,
The Art Spirit
The object of painting a picture is not to make a picture—however unreasonable this may sound. The p...
Jan 29
Thinking in Common
Virginia Woolf,
A Room of One's Own
For masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking ...
Jan 28
The Irreducible Ingredient
Emily Dickinson,
Poems
To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,
Jan 27
The Blank Canvas's Idiotic Stare
Vincent van Gogh,
Letters to Theo van Gogh
Just slap anything on when you see a blank canvas staring at you like some imbecile. You don't know ...
Jan 26
Crooked Roads
William Blake,
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.
Jan 25
The Artifice of Eternity
William Butler Yeats,
Sailing to Byzantium
That is no country for old men. The young
Jan 24
What the Bees Know
Michel de Montaigne,
Essays, 'Of the Education of Children' (trans. John Florio)
Even as bees pillage here and there from flowers, but afterward make honey, which is all theirs; it ...
Jan 23
Property of Breath
Seneca,
Moral Letters to Lucilius, Letter 84
We should follow, men say, the example of the bees, who flit about and cull the flowers that are sui...
Jan 22
What Isn't There
Lao Tzu,
Tao Te Ching, Chapter 11
Thirty spokes unite in one hub;
Jan 21
The Only Question
Rainer Maria Rilke,
Letters to a Young Poet
You ask whether your verses are any good. You ask me. You have asked others before this. You send th...
Jan 20
The Demon and the Windowpane
George Orwell,
Why I Write
Sheer egoism. Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, to get your o...
Jan 18
The Labour of Tradition
T. S. Eliot,
Tradition and the Individual Talent
Yet if the only form of tradition, of handing down, consisted in following the ways of the immediate...
Jan 17
The Irritable Reaching
John Keats,
Letter to George and Tom Keats (December 21, 1817)
I had not a dispute but a disquisition with Dilke, upon various subjects; several things dove-tailed...
Jan 16
The Liberty of the Workman
John Ruskin,
The Stones of Venice
Go forth again to gaze upon the old cathedral front, where you have smiled so often at the fantastic...
Jan 15
Resistant Surfaces
Matthew Crawford,
Shop Class as Soulcraft
The use of tools requires a certain posture toward the world: the user must be attentive to the resi...