145 Posts found for Author: Maria Popova

In our longing for certainty we keep propping ourselves up from the elemental wobbliness of life on the crutch of opinion. Few things are more seductive to us than a ready opinion, and we brandish few things more flagrantly as we move through the world, slicing through its fundamental uncertainty with our insecure certitudes.

Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior

To be human is to long for constancy, to crave the touchingly impossible assurance that what we have and cherish will be ours to hold forever, just as it is now. We build homes — fragile haikus of concrete and glass to be unwritten by the first earthquake or flood. We make vows — fragile promises to be upheld by selves we haven’t met in … [ Read more ]

Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Life & Society, Psychology | Behavior

The human brain is a prediction machine that evolved to render reality as a composite of sensory input and prior expectation, but by continually and consciously testing our predictions against reality, we get to construct our lived experience — largely the product of how the brain handles its natural prediction errors.

Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Intelligence | Knowledge, Thought | Inquiry

Most of our psychological suffering and most of the pain we inflict on others stem from our confusion about what we want and all the consequent clumsiness with which we go after it.

Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Desires, Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior, Relationships

This is the great and terrifying truth about the creative life: Anything we make — all this longing for beauty and meaning, all these reckonings and raptures, these most passionate and personal fragments of being — is just a tiny seed compacting everything we are, blown into the wind that is the world.

Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Art, Concepts, Creativity and Innovation

In the world of science, we endeavor to uncover fundamental laws and elemental truths indifferent to our opinions of them — those selfsame truths and laws that made us and govern the electrical impulses coursing through our cortices at 100 meters per second to forge the thought-patterns of opinion. But in the human world where we live, we swirl in the movable host of human … [ Read more ]

Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Concepts, Education | Scholarship, Ethics | Integrity | Morality, Life & Society, Math & Science, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior, Sociology | Anthropology

Hope — a faculty decidedly different from and far more muscular than optimism — remains our most potent antidote to the passivity and resignation of cynicism. The great humanistic philosopher and psychologist Erich Fromm admonished against the common laziness of optimism and pessimism, but he extolled the counterpoint to both — active hope that empowers us “to think the unthinkable, yet to act within the … [ Read more ]

Authors: Erich Fromm, Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Concepts, Hope, Psychology | Behavior

Time baffles us with its elasticity, the way it slows down when we’re afraid and speeds up as we age. It harrows us with its stagnancy, the way waiting twists the psyche. It haunts us with its demand for meaning. Time is the breath in the lungs of life, the marrow in the skeleton of space, the substance we are made of… But while we … [ Read more ]

Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Productivity & Time Management

True curiosity is an open wonderment at what something is and how it works without emotional attachment to the outcome of observation and experiment. It is only when we cede emotional attachment that we can be truly free from judgment, for all judgment is feeling — usually some species of fear — masquerading as thought. And when we judge, we cannot understand.

Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Intelligence | Knowledge, Personal Improvement

A human being is a living constellation of contradictions, mostly opaque to itself.

Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subject: Psychology | Behavior

Beauty matters because it swings open the doors of perception, and it is by seeing — by taking in what is there, incorporating it into our inner world — that we can begin to comprehend and connect, out of which the sense of belonging arises.

Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Beauty | Aesthetics, Concepts

The quality of attention we pay something or someone is the measure of our love.

Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Love, Psychology | Behavior, Relationships

The history of our species is the history of mistaking our labels and models of things for the things themselves.

Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Thought | Inquiry, Thought Starters

The challenge is how to live with the knowledge that what steers us one way or another, toward terror or tenderness, can be the faintest and most random ripple in the surface of consciousness.

Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subject: Psychology | Behavior

[The] generative possibility of being wrong is by definition a function of the friction around being right — contention is the crucible of creation, within us and between us.

Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Concepts, Creativity and Innovation

We exist — and go on existing — because there is more hope than despair in us.

Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Hope, Psychology | Behavior

The discipline of countering our reflex for self-righteousness is a triumph of existential maturity — one increasingly rare in a culture where most people would rather armor themselves with judgment than tremble with uncertainty, would rather be right than understand.

Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Communication, Education | Scholarship, Life & Society, Politics & Public Policy, Psychology | Behavior

Desire is often so difficult to distinguish from love because it is rooted in longing, but longing exists only in absence and evaporates at the moment of attainment, while love grows more saturated the more presence and energy it is given.

Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Desires, Love, Psychology | Behavior

It is a strange thing, desire — so fiery yet so forlorn, aimed at having and animated by lack. In its restlessness and its pointedness, so single of focus, it shares psychic territory with addiction. Its Latin root — dē + sidus, “away from one’s star” — bespeaks its disorientation, its rush of longing, which we so easily mistake for love. And yet, when unplugged … [ Read more ]

Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Desires, Love, Psychology | Behavior, Relationships

The self-limitation of control is the cage of howling loneliness that keeps us from the freedom necessary for love… That mysterious aspect of love — unreachable by logic and reason, impervious to will and control — is why our choice in love is largely an illusion, why our slender margin of choice contains only the courage and patience with which we face its trembling uncertainty … [ Read more ]

Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Love, Psychology | Behavior