145 Posts found for Author: Maria Popova

The things people most commonly dread are as unworthy of dread to the wise person as the things they most desire are of wise desire.

Author: Maria Popova | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Wisdom

In our quest to do the best we can, we are apt to defeat ourselves by pushing against life with the brute force of uncalibrated ambition, razing our peace of mind on the sharp-edged sense that there is always more to achieve. If the object of life is not mere resilience but flourishing, attaining it may be less a matter of wild pursuit of favorable … [ Read more ]

Author: Maria Popova | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement

The most we can do, [Seneca] argues, is accept every card life deals us, be it winning or losing, as temporarily borrowed from the deck to which it must ultimately return. The measure of wisdom and the key to peace of mind is the nonresistance and graciousness with which we return what we have borrowed when the time of our loan is up.

Author: Maria Popova | Subject: Personal Improvement

Millennia of evolution have hardly allayed our preference for anecdote over probability — a failure to internalize mathematical rules known in psychology as the description‐experience gap, leading to what the Nobel-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman has memorably described as our tendency to draw our confidence in our beliefs not from the quality of the evidence but from the coherence of the story we have constructed. Numberless … [ Read more ]

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

One of the most damning paradoxes of our condition is that, again and again, we withhold from others the loving sympathy and empathic understanding we demand for ourselves. When we lose the reins of our own character, when we lash out or sulk or act from a small dark place, we hasten to rationalize our actions as situational — we were too tired, too triggered, … [ Read more ]

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

History is not what happened, but what survives the shipwrecks of judgment and chance.

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

To want what you want so fiercely, to love it so absolutely, is not a personal indulgence in hubris or delusion — it is the mightiest antidote to the terrors of being alive and, in consequence, the fuel for your most generous contribution to the world.

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

It is by wanting that we orient ourselves in the world, by finding and following our private North Star that we walk the path of becoming. To become, of course, is no easy task — to become, that is, what you yourself desire to be, without mistaking your culture’s or your idols’ or your lover’s desires for your own.

Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subject: Personal Improvement

The lives we live are bridges across the immense river of possibility, suspended by two pylons: what we want and what we make. In an ideal life — a life of purpose and deep fulfillment — the gulf of being closes and the pylons converge: We make what we want to see exist.

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

All great works suffer from and are saved by a gladsome blindness to what they ultimately demand of their creators.

Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Art, Insight, Literature | Arts

We have increasingly shifted our definitions of success from the immaterial to the material, from the interior to the exterior, from the private to the public. And in that shift, we have incurred a peculiar and perilous blindness to the moral and humanistic dimensions of success — to how being a good human being and a good member of a community, of a society, of … [ Read more ]

Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Life & Society, Material Possessions, Personal Improvement, Success / Failure

Over and over, people would overestimate the degree of control they had over events — smart people, people who excelled at many things, people who should have known better… The more they overestimated their own skill relative to luck, the less they learned from what the environment was trying to tell them, and the worse their decisions became… The illusion of control is what prevented … [ Read more ]

Authors: Maria Konnikova, Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) (December 8, 2020) | Subjects: Excerpts, Life & Society, Math & Science, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior

The golden age of consumerism […] has built a global economy by continually robbing us of the sense of meaning and selling it back to us at the price of the product.

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

Our collective memory always tends toward amnesia and erasure — especially of periods scarred by civilizational shame.

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

We are — as individuals, as a species, as a society — unfinished and incomplete, our story unwritten. Darwin and [Rachel] Carson both intimated that while there is disorientation in accepting ourselves as increments in advancement the arc of which far exceeds our lifetimes, there is also transcendence, for a story yet unfinished is a story with myriad possible endings — a story that forestalls … [ Read more ]

Author: Maria Popova | Subjects: Concepts, Life & Society, Meaning, Personal Improvement

Nowhere is our capacity for enchantment, nor our capacity for self-deception, greater than in love — the region of human experience where the path to truth is most obstructed by the bramble of rationalization and where we are most likely to be kidnapped by our own delicious delusions. There, it is perennially difficult to know what we really want; difficult to distinguish between love and … [ Read more ]

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

Our human foibles don’t negate our goodness or our desire for betterment but, rather, provide both the fuel for it and the yardstick by which we measure our moral progress.

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

This is how the world changes: We loosen the stranglehold of our givens, bend and stretch our minds to imagine what was once unimaginable, test our theories against reality, and emerge with vision expanded into new dimensions of truth.

Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Change, Concepts, Personal Improvement

Our addiction to untruths and mythologies spells the death of our ideals, and ideals are the material of the human spirit.

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

When we surrender the grandest, often unanswerable questions to the false certitudes of the smallest, we lose something essential of our humanity. When we aim the spears of those certitudes at one another, more interested in being right than in understanding, we lose something essential.

Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Concepts, Intelligence | Knowledge