And how is one to bring about sensitivity? Not that you must have regulations against picking the flowers, for when you are merely restrained by regulations, there is fear. But how is there to come into being this sensitivity which makes you alert not to...
Having a youthful mind also drives you toward a healthy lifestyle that will slow the aging process. Just as a lack of physical exercise has negative effects on our bodies and mood, a lack of mental exercise is bad for us because it causes our neurons...
I awake from my dream at 3 a.m., weeping into my pillow. Moving quietly, so as not to disturb Marilyn, I slip out of bed and into the bathroom, dry my eyes, and follow the directions I have given to my patients for fifty years: close...
Mill’s response to the second objection to utilitarianism—that it reduces all values to a single scale—also turns out to lean on moral ideals independent of utility. InUtilitarianism (1861), a long essay Mill wrote shortly after On Liberty, he tries to show that utilitarians can distinguish...
WHAT IS LOVE? It is unfortunate that we have to ask this question. In the natural course of things everybody would know what love-is. But I understand that nobody knows - or only very rarely - what love is. Love has become one of the rarest experiences. Yes,...
Days to come stand in front of us like a row of lighted candles— golden, warm, and vivid candles. Days gone by fall behind us, a gloomy line of snuffed-out candles; the nearest are smoking still, cold, melted, and bent. I don’t want to look at them: their shape saddens me, and it...
If society is corrupt, but not the individuals within it, then where did the corruption originate? How is it propagated? It’s a one-sided, deeply ideological theory. Even more problematic is the insistence logically stemming from this presumption of social corruption that all individual problems, no matter how...
Recently, I watched a three-year-old boy trail his mother and father slowly through a crowded airport. He was screaming violently at five-second intervals—and, more important, he was doing it voluntarily. He wasn’t at the end of this tether. As a parent, I could tell from the tone. He...
“It is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them.” Ralph Waldo Emerson, American Philosopher (1803–1882), Transcendentalist Through the ages, an impressive number of philosophers - from hedonists to transcendentalists - have rated friendship as life's greatest pleasure. Not...
