7 Posts found for Author: Jane Ellen Harrison

Anyone who honestly wants to be young again has never lived, only imagined, only masqueraded.

Author: Jane Ellen Harrison | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Experience, Life & Society

In trying to impose its experience as a law to youth [Old Age] sins not only through ignorance, but from sheer selfishness. Parents try to impose their view of life on their children not merely or mostly to save those children from disaster — that to a certain extent and up to a certain age we must all do — but from possessiveness, from a … [ Read more ]

Author: Jane Ellen Harrison | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Life & Society, Relationships

Acting is sinking your own personality in order that you may mimic another’s. Masquerading is borrowing another’s personality, putting on the mask of another’s features, dress, experiences, emotions, and thereby enhancing your own… Youth, and especially shy Youth, is strongly possessed by the instinctive desire to masquerade.

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Masquerading bores Crabbed Age. Why?

Simply because the impulse to imaginative self-enhancement dies down as soon as liberty to … [ Read more ]

Author: Jane Ellen Harrison | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Life & Society, Psychology | Behavior

The reasons by which people back up their prejudices are mostly negligible — not reason at all at bottom, but just instinctive self-justifications; but prejudice, rising as it does in emotion, has its roots in life and reality.

Author: Jane Ellen Harrison | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Thought | Inquiry

I am long past blame and praise, or, rather, I am not yet ready for them; there is so much still waiting to be understood.

Author: Jane Ellen Harrison | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Wisdom

We can, with spiritual safety, rebel only in so far as we are personally sensitive to the claims of other individual lives that touch our own. The old herd-problem remains of how to live together; and as the union grows closer and more intricate the chances of mutual hurt are greater, and the sensitiveness must grow keener. Others are safe from and with us only … [ Read more ]

Author: Jane Ellen Harrison | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Life & Society, Relationships

Patriotism is collective herd-instinct; it is repressive of individuality. You feel strongly because you feel alike; you are reinforced by the other homogenous unites; you sing the same song and wave the same flag.

Author: Jane Ellen Harrison | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: International, Life & Society, Psychology | Behavior