Music at Night and Other Essays

Aldous Huxley

“The universe throws down a challenge to the human spirit… We have a right to our moods of sober exultation.”

Aldous Huxley on how the Moon illuminates the complementarity of science and spirituality – immensely poetic read from 1931:

A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines

Janna Levin

“The body provides something for the spirit to look after and use.”

Computing pioneer Alan Turing on love and loss:

The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama

Pico Iyer

“To understand the Dalai Lama … perhaps it’s most useful to see him as a doctor of the soul.”

Illuminating read on the Dalai Lama’s daily routine, his information diet, and his deeper motive for both:

The Life of Charlotte Brontë

Elizabeth Gaskell

Charlotte Brontë on faith and atheism:

Essays in Zen Buddhism, First Series

D.T. Suzuki

“The ego-shell in which we live is the hardest thing to outgrow.”

Legendary Zen sage D.T. Suzuki on what freedom really means and Zen can help us cultivate our character:

Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life

Karen Armstrong

“Compassion… asks us to look into our own hearts, discover what gives us pain, and then refuse, under any circumstance whatsoever, to inflict that pain on anybody else.”

Spectacular and urgently important read on religion, secular morality, and what compassion really means:

Einstein’s God: Conversations About Science and the Human Spirit

Krista Tippett

“How we ask our questions affects the answers we arrive at… Science and religion… ask different kinds of questions altogether, probing and illuminating in ways neither could alone.”

Einstein’s God – mind-bending, soul-stretching read on free will, science, and spirituality:

David Steindl-Rast: Essential Writings

David Steindl-Rast

“A piece of music doesn’t come to an end when its purpose is accomplished. It has no purpose, strictly speaking. It is the playful unfolding of meaning.”

David Steindl-Rast on purposeful work, play, what leisure really means, and how to find meaning in life’s superfluities:

Of Africa

Wole Soyinka

Wole Soyinka, the first African writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, on medicine and spirituality:

A Hidden Wholeness: The Journey Toward an Undivided Life

Parker J. Palmer

“Wholeness does not mean perfection: it means embracing brokenness as an integral part of life.”

The wise and wonderful Parker Palmer on the elusive art of inner wholeness and how to stop hiding our souls

Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion

Sam Harris

“Our world is dangerously riven by religious doctrines that all educated people should condemn, and yet there is more to understanding the human condition than science and secular culture generally admit.”

Sam Harris on spirituality without religion and how to cultivate the art of presence as our greatest gateway to happiness – spectacular read:

A Letter to a Hindu

graf Leo Tolstoy

“Love is the only way to rescue humanity from all ills.”

Why We Hurt Each Other – Tolstoy’s letters to Gandhi on love, violence, and the truth of the human spirit:

The Accidental Universe: The World You Thought You Knew

Alan Lightman

Alan Lightman on our yearning for immortality and why we long for permanence in a universe of constant change – a heartening perspective on mortality by way of the physics of the cosmos and the poetics of the night-blooming cereus cactus.

A Confession

Leo Tolstoy

“For man to be able to live he must either not see the infinite, or have such an explanation of the meaning of life as will connect the finite with the infinite.”

Leo Tolstoy on how we can find meaning in a meaningless world – the kind of read that stays with you for a lifetime: