Whatever You Are, Be a Good One
From Tolstoy to Tumblr, a compendium of timeless wisdom on life.
In March of 1884, Leo Tolstoy resolved in his diary to create a “circle of reading” for himself, probing “the great philosophers of all time and all people” for wisdom on how to live well. This was the birth of his famous Calendar of Wisdom, which he spent the remaining seventeen years of his life piecing together.
Now comes a wonderful modern-day counterpart that falls partway between Tolstoy and Tumblr: Whatever You Are, Be a Good One (public library) — an impossibly charming compendium of 100 wise and timeless thoughts from some of history’s greatest minds, hand-lettered by illustrator and Brain Pickings collaborator Lisa Congdon. The common thread underpinning these quotes — which include such beloved luminaries as Albert Camus, Simone de Beauvoir, Henry James, Anne Lamott,Søren Kierkegaard, and Leo Tolstoy himself — is Congdon’s own sensibility about what it means to live with kindness and integrity, to cherish beauty and the creative spirit, and ultimately to be a good human being.