What lies ahead is a remarkable but wearisome journey [on a] runaway train. No one can tell you what lies ahead, least of all those who remain behind. One thing, however, they can assure you of is that it’s not a round trip. Try, therefore, to derive some comfort form the notion that no matter how unpalatable this or that station may turn out to … [ Read more ]
Author: Joseph Brodsky | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement
What’s good about boredom, about anguish and the sense of the meaninglessness of your own, of everything else’s existence, is that it is not a deception.
Author: Joseph Brodsky | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subject: Life & Society
You live in a democracy — this halfway house between nightmare and utopia — which throws fewer obstacles in the way of an individual than its alternatives.
Author: Joseph Brodsky | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subject: Politics & Public Policy
Life is a game with many rules but no referee. One learns how to play it more by watching it than by consulting any book, including the Holy Book. Small wonder, then, that so many play dirty, that so few win, that so many lose.
Author: Joseph Brodsky | Subjects: Insight, Life & Society
On December 18, 1988, twenty-five years after his writing had been denounced as “anti-Soviet” in his native Russia and mere months after winning the Nobel Prize in Literature “for an all-embracing authorship, imbued with clarity of thought and poetic intensity,” prolific poet and essayist Joseph Brodsky (May 24, 1940–January 28, 1996) took the podium at Ann Arbor and addressed the graduating class at the University … [ Read more ]
Authors: Joseph Brodsky, Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) (December 18, 2013) | Subjects: Advice, Articles & Links, Excerpts, Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Wisdom
“What we regard as Evil is capable of a fairly ubiquitous presence if only because it tends to appear in the guise of good.”
Authors: Joseph Brodsky, Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) (October 25, 2016) | Subjects: Excerpts, Good & Evil, Insight, Life & Society, Sociology | Anthropology