#Iris Murdoch

Author: Maria Popova / Source: Brain Pickings “Mankind is challenged, as it has never been challenged before, to prove its maturity and its mastery — not of nature, but of itself. Therein lies our hope and our destiny,” the great marine biologist and author Rachel Carson addressed the next

Author: Maria Popova / Source: Brain Pickings “A society must assume that it is stable, but the artist must know, and he must let us know, that there is nothing stable under heaven,” James Baldwin wrote in 1962 as he considered the creative process and the artist’s responsibility in society.

Author: Maria Popova / Source: Brain Pickings “To create today is to create dangerously,” Albert Camus wrote in the late 1950s as he contemplated the role of the artist as a voice of resistance. “In our age,” W.H. Auden observed around the same time across the Atlantic, “the mere making of a work

Author: Maria Popova / Source: Brain Pickings It is a rare gift to meet, much less befriend, one of your heroes — a gift that fell upon the American poet, novelist, and diarist extraordinaire May Sarton (May 3, 1912–July 16, 1995) in her mid-twenties, just as she was starting out as a writer,