The Journal of Henry David Thoreau, 1837-1861

Henry David Thoreau

“We hear and apprehend only what we already half know.”

Thoreau on knowing vs. seeing and what it takes to receive reality as it really is:

Specimen Days and Collect

Walt Whitman

“After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, love, and so on — have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear — what remains? Nature remains; to bring out from their torpid recesses, the affinities of a man or woman with the open air, the trees, fields, the changes of seasons — the sun by day and the stars of heaven by night.”

Walt Whitman, after surviving a paralytic stroke, on what makes life worth living:

The Diary of Alice James

Alice James

“It is the most supremely interesting moment in life, the only one in fact when living seems life.”

How to live fully while dying – wisdom from the extraordinary diary of Alice James, William and Henry James’s brilliant sister:

John Quincy Adams: Diaries 1779-1821

John Quincy Adams

John Quincy Adams on efficiency vs. effectiveness, the proper aim of ambition, and his daily routine:

Memoir and Correspondence of Caroline Herschel (Classic Reprint)

Mrs John Herschel

Hooked on the Heavens – the story of how Caroline Herschel, the first professional woman astronomer, nearly died by meathook in the name of science:

Daybook: The Journal of an Artist

Anne Truitt

“I saw myself stretched like brown earth in furrows, open to the sky, well planted, my life as a human being complete.”

Artist Anne Truitt on the transcendent sense of “enough” and the epiphany that revealed to her the purpose of art:

The Journals of John Cheever

John Cheever

“A lonely man is a lonesome thing, a stone, a bone, a stick, a receptacle for Gilbey’s gin, a stooped figure sitting at the edge of a hotel bed, heaving copious sighs like the autumn wind.”

John Cheever on loneliness and how it feeds the creative restlessness of youth:

Journal of a Solitude

May Sarton

“Sometimes one has simply to endure a period of depression for what it may hold of illumination if one can live through it, attentive to what it exposes or demands.”

May Sarton on living with depression and solitude as the seedbed for self-discovery:

Turn: The Journal of an Artist

Anne Truitt

“I should have had more courage, dared, risked rejection, even ejection — naked, awkward, crouched as Eve in Masaccio’s Expulsion from Paradise. ‘Should’ is a dreadful auxiliary word, and worst when linked with ‘have’… I mourn what I did not know when I was married: the necessity for honesty between people if mutuality is to bud out of a status quo into air it can then fill with a new form.”

Artist Anne Truitt on love, loss, and what makes marriage work – one of the most beautiful and truthful things ever written:

Last Diaries

Leo Tolstoy

“Reason and love define the demands of human nature… The demands of reason and love must not be subordinated to the demands of habit.”

Leo Tolstoy, shortly before his death, on love, reason, human nature, and what gives meaning to our lives:

The Diaries Of Leo Tolstoy: Youth

Leo Tolstoy

“That which one has set oneself to do, one should not relinquish on the grounds of absence of mind or distraction.”

Young Leo Tolstoy on personal growth and how he found his purpose – a glimpse inside his youthful diaries:

Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters

John Steinbeck

“A good writer always works at the impossible.”

John Steinbeck on writing, the crucible of creativity, and the mobilizing power of the impossible:

Turn: The Journal of an Artist

Anne Truitt

“Vulnerability is a guardian of integrity.”

Artist Anne Truitt on vulnerability, integrity, and what nourishes the creative spirit – the most wonderful thing I’ve read in ages:

Moments of Being

Virginia Woolf

“Behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern… the whole world is a work of art… there is no Shakespeare… no Beethoven… no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself.”

Virginia Woolf’s account of why she became a writer remains the most piercing articulation of the creative impulse ever committed to words – devour it at the link:

Louise Bourgeois Destruction of the Father / Reconstruction of the Father: Writings and Interviews, 1923-1997

Louise Bourgeois

“To be an artist is a guarantee to your fellow humans that the wear and tear of living will not let you become a murderer.”

Louise Bourgeois on art, integrity, the trap of false humility, and the key to creative confidence – wisdom from a lifetime of her previously unpublished diaries and letters: