Avoidance is one of the commonest ways of hedging against our fear of rejection and hurt — a coping mechanism for disappointment that we developed when the people first tasked with caring for us let us down.
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Psychology | Behavior, Relationships
Instead of requesting reassurance endearingly and laying out our longing with charm, we have tendencies to mask our needs beneath some tricky behaviors guaranteed to frustrate our ultimate aims.
Author: Alain de Botton | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Psychology | Behavior, Relationships
Living alone can be deeply rewarding and deeply challenging. It is not for everyone. It is not for those who romanticize its offerings of freedom and focus, but excise its menacing visitations of loneliness and alienation. It is not for those who find silence shattering. It is especially not for those who hunger for another consciousness to validate their experience and redeem their reality. It … [ Read more ]
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subject: Life & Society
When you love, truly love somebody, there is no version of reality in which what is good for them is bad for you, no choice they could possibly make that is right for them and wrong for you, nothing they could give you that could make love more complete.
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Concepts, Love, Relationships
The self, the place where we live, is a place of illusion.
Author: Iris Murdoch | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Life & Society, Psychology | Behavior
What we choose and how we choose it defines the measure of our sanity, and how we go about choosing our adaptive delusions over the maladaptive ones defines our fitness for life.
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior
We are touchingly prone to mistaking our models of reality for reality itself, mistaking the strength of our certainty for the strength of the evidence, thus moving through a dream of our own making that we call life.
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Life & Society, Thought | Inquiry
We spend our lives trying to anchor our transience in some illusion of permanence and stability. We lay plans, we make vows, we backbone the flow of uncertainty with habits and routines that lull us with the comforting dream of predictability and control, only to find ourselves again and again bent at the knees with surrender to forces and events vastly larger than us. In … [ Read more ]
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Life & Society, Psychology | Behavior
It is easy—maybe too easy—to stop asking yourself what would make you happy, and stay close to the things that you think will make you safe. This is wrong, and I will tell you why: you are never safe. Loss and change are constants. You will never be safe, and you may not always be happy—but you owe it to yourself to start asking the … [ Read more ]
Author: Sady Doyle | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement
A good rule of thumb in decision making is, whenever you cannot decide what you should do, choose the action that represents a change, rather than continuing the status quo.
Author: Steven Levitt | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Thought | Inquiry
Take your jobs and your responsibilities very seriously, but don’t take yourselves too seriously.
Author: Judith Persichilli | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement
I am a determinist. As such, I do not believe in free will… I believe with Schopenhauer: We can do what we wish, but we can only wish what we must. Practically, I am, nevertheless, compelled to act is if freedom of the will existed. If I wish to live in a civilized community, I must act as if man is a responsible being.
Author: Albert Einstein | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Concepts, Freedom | Liberty, Life & Society, Philosophy
The sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, psychic, or intellectual, forms a bridge between the sharers which can be the basis for understanding much of what is not shared between them, and lessens the threat of their difference.
Author: Audre Lorde | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Life & Society, Relationships
Whenever you think or you believe or you know, you’re a lot of other people: but the moment you feel, you’re nobody-but-yourself.
Author: E.E. Cummings | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Life & Society, Psychology | Behavior
Your legacy is every life you touch.
Author: Maya Angelou | Source: HBS Working Knowledge | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement
Not everybody can be famous, but everybody can be great. Because greatness is determined by service.
Author: Martin Luther King Jr. | Source: HBS Working Knowledge | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement
You want money, power, pleasure, and fame. That’s what you want, right? If you make those things the goals, you’re in trouble. You’re in trouble. The goals are faith, family, friends, and work that serves. You can use money, power, pleasure, and fame but only as a springboard to those other things.
Author: Arthur C. Brooks | Source: HBS Working Knowledge | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement
Emotions are not good things and bad things. Positive and negative emotions are simply information about the outside world. You need your negative emotions because in the Pleistocene you’d be hunted down by a saber tooth tiger. And today without your negative emotions, you’d get run over by a car.
You need negative emotions. And that means you can’t be happy. What you can be with … [ Read more ]
Author: Arthur C. Brooks | Source: HBS Working Knowledge | Subjects: Life & Society, Psychology | Behavior
Without fullness of experience, length of days is nothing. When fullness of life has been achieved, shortness of days is nothing. That is perhaps why the young … have usually so little fear of death; they live by intensities that the elderly have forgotten.
Author: Lewis Mumford | Source: The Art of Manliness | Subjects: Experience, Life & Society
When we are young, we are slavishly employed in procuring something whereby we may live comfortably when we grow old; and when we are old, we perceive it is too late to live as we proposed.
Author: Alexander Pope | Source: The Art of Manliness | Subject: Life & Society