At the heart of this murderous self-importance is our troubled relationship to power — the power within and between selves, its confused uses and abuses, its role as a mirror for our emotional incompleteness. Out of it arises the entire dynamic system we call society and all the inner turmoil of discerning where we end and the world begins.
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Concepts, Life & Society, Power
The paradox of progress is that because there is no universal utopia — every utopia is built on someone’s back — there can be no universal progress, no absolute measure of it. Its relativism conceals a euphemism for moving the world in the direction of one’s own desires, relativism laced with myriad hypocrisies.
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: History, Life & Society, Politics & Public Policy
What we see is never raw reality, pure as spacetime — what we see is our interpretation of reality, filtered through the lens of our experience and our conditioned worldview. Always, the way we look at things shapes what we see; often, the lens we mistake for a magnifying glass turns out to be a warped mirror — we see others not as they are … [ Read more ]
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Life & Society, Perception | Observation, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior, Relationships
We are untender with each other because we cannot bear the terrifying difficulty of being human, vulnerable and perishable as we are.
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subject: Psychology | Behavior
We will lose everything we love, including our lives — so we might as well love without fear, for to fear a certainty is wasted energy that syphons life of aliveness.
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Life & Society, Love, Personal Improvement, Relationships
Uncertainty is the price of beauty, and integrity the only compass for the territory of uncertainty that constitutes the landmass of any given life. And so the best we can do is walk step by next intuitively right step until one day, pausing to catch our breath, we turn around and gasp at a path. If we have been lucky enough, if we have been … [ Read more ]
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement
Nothing kidnaps our capacity for presence more cruelly than longing. And yet longing is also the most powerful creative force we know: Out of our longing for meaning came all of art; out of our longing for truth all of science; out of our longing for love the very fact of life. We may give this undertone of being different names […] but we recognize … [ Read more ]
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Life & Society, Psychology | Behavior
There is deep consolation in the knowledge that the cherished friend will always return, long though the stretches of absence may be; there is singular solace in the understanding that leaving need not be abandonment, that time and space avail not in any true bond, which nothing but indifference can break.
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Life & Society, Psychology | Behavior, Relationships
All creative work is at bottom a means of self-liberation and a coping mechanism — for the loneliness, the despair, the chaos and contradiction within. It is the best means we have of transmuting that which gnaws at us into something that nourishes, and yet how little of that private ferment is visible in the finished work.
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Art, Concepts, Creativity and Innovation, Psychology | Behavior
[Albert] Schweitzer observed that there are two types of artists: the subjective, who use their personality as the wellspring of their art and live as “a law unto themselves,” and the objective, whose “artistic personality exists independently of the human” and whose art is “not impersonal, but superpersonal,” channeling the universal and the eternal through the vessel of their being.
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subject: Art
We went on making equations and theories and bombs in an attempt to control life; we went on making poems and paintings and songs in an attempt to live with the fact that we cannot.
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Art, Life & Society, Music, Psychology | Behavior
No territory of life exposes both our power and our vulnerability more brightly than a beginning.
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Experience, Life & Society, Personal Improvement
Purpose and meaning are not inherent to the universe but our own creation… all of our reckonings with the nature of reality are a mirror we hold up to ourselves.
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Concepts, Life & Society, Meaning, Psychology | Behavior
Inseparable from the question of freedom is the nature of the imagination — that ultimate frontier of our freedom of thought.
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Concepts, Creativity and Innovation, Freedom | Liberty
Nothing does more damage in love than a paucity of self-knowledge.
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Love, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior, Relationships
We mistake much for love – admiration, attraction, need. We fumble and fall again and again into the treacherous abyss between the idea of love – an idea baggaged with millennia of cultural mythologies – and the reality of love, with all its work and responsibility.
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Love, Psychology | Behavior, Relationships
The twin root of our suffering in a changing relationship is the expectation — the demand, even — that the other’s love be total and permanent, reserved for us alone, unshared with other priorities and passions, those natural constituents of a fully developed personality and a fully inhabited life.
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Love, Psychology | Behavior
A problem is a judgment and all judgment is a straitjacket of understanding; a question is an invitation to wonder, which is the antipode of judgment.
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior
Two millennia after Seneca devised his cautionary taxonomy of time saved, spent, and wasted, we have invented innumerable tools and technologies to save time but find ourselves wasting it more helplessly than ever.
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Personal Improvement, Productivity & Time Management
[Time] is the elementary particle of presence and the fundamental unit of attention — the two most precious resources we have, out of which every meaningful experiences is welded. To give a practice your time is an act of devotion. To give a person your time is a supreme act of love.
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Productivity & Time Management