While we are born wakeful to wonder, our cultural conditioning and indoctrination — what we call our education — often schools us out of it.
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Concepts, Creativity and Innovation, Education | Scholarship, Life & Society, Psychology | Behavior
Kurt Vonnegut exposed the taproot of our modern suffering as the gnawing sense that what we have is not enough, that what we are is not enough. This is our modern curse: A century of conspicuous consumption has trained us to be dutiful citizens of the Republic of Not Enough, swearing allegiance to the marketable myth of scarcity, hoarding toilet paper for the apocalypse. Along … [ Read more ]
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Consumerism, Life & Society, Material Possessions
The art of poetry, like the art of living, is a matter of the quality of attention we pay to things.
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Advice, Literature | Arts, Personal Improvement
Language is always a placeholder for a culture’s evolving understanding of itself, the space in which we work out our concepts as we learn how to think about them in learning how to speak of them.
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Insight, Language, Life & Society
And yet, within these narrow parameters of being, nothing appeals to us more than the notion of freedom — the feeling that we are free, that intoxicating illusion with which we blunt the hard fact that we are not. The more abstract and ideological the realm, the more vehemently we can insist that moral choice in specific situations within narrow parameters proves a totality of … [ Read more ]
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Concepts, Freedom | Liberty, Love
Because the units of knowledge are concepts, and concepts can be conveyed and transmitted in words and symbols, knowledge itself can be passed between persons. Understanding, on the other hand, is intimate and subjective, not a conceptual container but an aura of immediacy cast upon an experience — which means it cannot be transmitted and transacted like knowledge.
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Intelligence | Knowledge
To understand anything — another person’s experience of reality, another fundamental law of physics — is to restructure our existing knowledge, shifting and broadening our prior frames of reference to accommodate a new awareness. And yet we have a habit of confusing our knowledge — which is always limited and incomplete: a model of the cathedral of reality, built from primary-colored blocks of fact — … [ Read more ]
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Intelligence | Knowledge, Personal Improvement
We feel our way through life, then rationalize our actions, as if emotion were a shameful scar on the countenance of reason. […] Our emotional lives [are] the root of our motives beneath the topsoil of reason and rationalization. – Maria Popova
—
We suffer primarily because we are so insentient to our own emotions, so illiterate in reading ourselves. – Maria Popova
—
The main difficulty that faces … [ Read more ]
Authors: John Macmurray, Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Concepts, Education | Scholarship, Excerpts, Intelligence | Knowledge, Personal Improvement, Senses, Thought | Inquiry
“My experience is what I agree to attend to.” – William James
—
“Nothing we do or experience … is untouched by our own expectations. Instead, there is a constant give-and-take in which what we experience reflects not just what the world is currently telling us, but what we — consciously or nonconsciously — were expecting it to be telling us. One consequence of this is that … [ Read more ]
Authors: Andy Clark, Maria Popova, William James | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Excerpts, Insight, Psychology | Behavior, Senses, Thought | Inquiry
For centuries, our culture conditioned us to “see the problem of love primarily as that of being loved, rather than that of loving,” which in turn conditioned us to believe that the hardest thing about love is finding the right person to love us, but once we do, love is easy. [Erich] Fromm inverted this equation. […] he observed that the key to love is … [ Read more ]
Authors: Erich Fromm, Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Concepts, Love
Hope — and the wise, effective action that can spring from it — is the counterweight to the heavy sense of our own fragility. It is a continual negotiation between optimism and despair, a continual negation of cynicism and naïveté. We hope precisely because we are aware that terrible outcomes are always possible and often probable, but that the choices we make can impact the … [ Read more ]
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Concepts, Hope, Insight, Life & Society
One might even say that moving minds — our own as well as those of others — is among the most effortful labor there is.
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subject: Personal Improvement
Memory, then, is not the pencil with which the outline of a life is drawn but the eraser — something as true of our personal memory as it is of our collective memory, which contains everything we know as culture.
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Culture, Life & Society, Memory
The vast majority of life unfolds in the small, unremembered moments that furnish the microscopic threads in the tapestry of being.
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Experience, Life & Society
To respond in a reactive culture, to marry firm moral conviction with a spirit of goodwill and the porousness necessary for appraising other perspectives in order to evolve one’s own, is a Herculean feat of character. And yet there are instances in which it is unsound to engage with another whose values are so antithetical to one’s own that the collision is bound to shatter … [ Read more ]
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Communication, Personal Improvement, Relationships
The task of education, John Dewey asserted […] is not “to teach every possible item of information [but] to cultivate deep-seated and effective habits of discriminating tested beliefs from mere assertions, guesses, and opinions.”
Authors: John Dewey, Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subject: Education | Scholarship
Happiness defies the usual laws of effort and achievement: The more ferociously we try to attain it, the more it eludes us.
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Happiness, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior
…for where truth is absolute — a binary correspondence with reality: a premise either reflects reality or does not — meaning can be relative; it is shaped by one’s subjective interpretation, which is contingent upon beliefs and can be manipulated. Certainty lives in the realm of meaning, not of truth. […] All propaganda is in the business of manipulating certainty, but it can never manipulate … [ Read more ]
Authors: Hannah Arendt, Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Concepts, Education | Scholarship, Ethics | Integrity | Morality, Insight, Life & Society, Thought | Inquiry
We read for countless reasons and books transform us in countless ways, reckoned and unreckoned. We read the way we love — with our whole selves, with the flickering constellation of values, longings, traumas, joys, hopes, despairs, formative experiences, and half-remembered impressions composing the self. We read with our whole being, but we also read ourselves into being as each book quietly reconfigures the constellation … [ Read more ]
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Literature | Arts, Reading | Writing
The impermanence of things — of seasons and lifetimes and galaxies and loves — is what confers preciousness and sweetness upon them.
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Insight, Life & Society, Perception | Observation