Beyond Wealth

Of course, it’s not easy to find the right balance between achievement and enjoyment. But when things are out of whack, the symptoms are pretty obvious. The people around us are talking, but we aren’t listening. We’re divided between what is happening here and what is happening somewhere else. Or we’re thinking about what will happen tomorrow . . .

His interest was in the principles that unite us, not the doctrines that divide us. Following Jesus’ insistence that the kingdom of Heaven is within you, Emerson sought moral universals, what he called “interior truth.” He insisted, for example, that if the Confucians in China, the stoics of Athens, the noblest Buddhists, and the wisest Christians

The local library offers all the world’s greatest books—with no waiting list. (If you’re unsure where to begin, pick up a guide like The New Lifetime Reading Plan.) Most enduring works can be downloaded for free. For a few dollars, you can own high-quality, digital recordings of the world’s greatest music performed by the finest symphony orchestras

But what is there to fear in knowledge? Recent research from the independent Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life found that Americans by all measures are a deeply religious people, but they are also deeply ignorant of religion. Three thousand, four hundred people randomly selected to answer a 32-question survey about the Bible, Christianity, and

To live content with small means; to seek elegance rather than luxury, and refinement rather than fashion; to be worthy, not respectable, and wealthy, not rich . . . to study hard, to think quietly, act frankly, talk gently, await occasions, hurry never; in a word, to let the spiritual, unbidden and unconscious, grow up through the common—this is m

I know of no better nutshell statement of the path to finding one’s true calling in life than the simple formula given by Aristotle: Where your talents and the needs of the world cross, there lies your vocation. These two, your talents and the needs of the world, are the great wake-up calls to your true vocation in life. To ignore either is, in som

Norman Vincent Peale got it half right. Positive visualization helps you get what you want. Negative visualization helps you want what you get.

A theologian, essayist, orator, and poet, Emerson is variously described as America’s own philosopher, our first literary giant, the father of the environmental movement, and the founder of what literary critic Harold Bloom calls “the American religion,” a distinctive blend of individualism and self-reliance. Emerson’s philosophy, Transcendentalism

Without natural science, we may also miss great beauty and understanding. In Unweaving the Rainbow (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1998), Oxford biologist Richard Dawkins writes: After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with color, bountiful with life. Within decades we must clo