Men are anxious to improve their circumstances, but are unwilling to improve themselves; they therefore remain bound. Let a man radically alter his thoughts, and he will be astonished at the rapid transformation it will effect in the material conditions of his life. Men imagine that thought can be kept secret, but it cannot; it rapidly crystallizes

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately,” he wrote, “to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, to discover that I had not lived.” Of course, vanishing into the woods isn’t a realistic option for most of us. Some might even say it smacks of running fr

“It is a cold, lifeless business,” he wrote, “when you go to the shops to buy something which does not represent your life and talent, but a goldsmith’s.”

“Anything else you worship,” argued David Foster Wallace at a commencement address at Kenyon College in 2005, “will almost certainly eat you alive. If you worship money and things—if they are where you tap real meaning in life—then you will never have enough. . . . Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, an

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

What caused the Big Bang? Why are the physical constants just right to allow galaxies, planets, and, ultimately, conscious life? Where do the physical laws come from? If they aren’t of divine providence, how can they be explained? Why is nature shadowed by a mathematical reality? In short, why do theoretical physics work?

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

Emily Dickinson said it about the printed word, but it could as easily apply to the other arts as well: There is no frigate like a book To take us lands away, Nor any coursers like a page Of prancing poetry. This traverse may the poorest take Without oppress of toll; How frugal is the chariot That bears a human soul!

Pythagoras, the sixth-century bc philosopher and mathematician, asked that his followers take time, before going to sleep each night, to pose three questions: What have I done? Where have I failed myself? What responsibility have I not fulfilled?