Love every leaf… Love the animals, love the plants, love everything. If you love everything, you will perceive the divine mystery in things. Once you have perceived it, you will begin to comprehend it better every day, and you will come at last to love the world with an all-embracing love.
Author: Fyodor Dostoyevsky | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Concepts, Environment | Sustainability, Love, Nature, Personal Improvement
In my youth I longed for the unknown, and for the unknown I am still longing. But in the days of my youth longing embraced necessity that knows naught of patience. Today I long not less, but my longing is friendly with patience, and even waiting.
Author: Kahlil Gibran | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement
The selves we have been — young and foolish, hungry for the wrong things, hopeful for the right but winged by hope into hubris — are elemental building blocks of who we become, unsheddable like the hydrogen and helium that made the universe.
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Experience, Life & Society
It is a strange and uncanny result of urban civilization and the impact of technology on human experience that leisure has become a pursuit and an end in itself. It has gradually become an industry, a profession and an imperative social need of the individuals in modern societies. Everyone strives for more and more leisure and knows less and less what to do with it. … [ Read more ]
Author: Masud Khan | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Life & Society, Psychology | Behavior
Bertrand Russell called it “fruitful monotony.” Adam Phillips called it “fertile solitude.” Walt Whitman called it “loafing.” The Buddhist tradition describes it simply as presence. Whatever we may call it, amid a culture of filling the existential void with cultish productivity and an endless stream of dopamine-laced distractions, it is nothing less than a countercultural act of courage and resistance to enact such states of … [ Read more ]
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Productivity & Time Management
Wisdom is knowing I am nothing, Love is knowing I am everything, and between the two my life moves.
Author: Nisargadatta Maharaj | Subjects: Concepts, Education | Scholarship, Love, Wisdom
What is ordinary is that people look for something special. But what is special is when people settle down in the ordinary.
Author: Shunryu Suzuki Roshi | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior
In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.
Author: Shunryu Suzuki Roshi | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Experience, Learning, Life & Society
We are like books. Most people only see our cover, the minority read only the introduction, many people believe the critics. Few will know our content.
Author: Émile Zola | Subjects: Life & Society, Relationships
Mistakes are at the very base of human thought, embedded there, feeding the structure like root nodules. If we were not provided with the knack of being wrong, we could never get anything useful done. We think our way along by choosing between right and wrong alternatives, and the wrong choices have to be made as frequently as the right ones. We get along in … [ Read more ]
Author: Lewis Thomas | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Experience, Learning, Life & Society
In a society characterized by freedom of conscience and freedom of expression, individuals bear “burdens of judgment,” as the American philosopher John Rawls wrote. Without the government or an official church telling people what to think, we all have to decide for ourselves – and that inevitably leads to a diversity of moral viewpoints.
Author: James Steiner-Dillon | Source: The Conversation | Subjects: Concepts, Ethics | Integrity | Morality, Life & Society
The liberal democracy is an artificial environment, carefully crafted to both contain human nature and convert it into an engine of progress. When we grow up within an artificial habitat that values human inventions like reason and fairness and humanity, it can be easy to forget just how tenuous that environment is. It’s easy to forget that we’re living in a rare anomaly within human … [ Read more ]
Author: Tim Urban | Subjects: Life & Society, Politics & Public Policy
Anyone who honestly wants to be young again has never lived, only imagined, only masqueraded.
Author: Jane Ellen Harrison | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Experience, Life & Society
In trying to impose its experience as a law to youth [Old Age] sins not only through ignorance, but from sheer selfishness. Parents try to impose their view of life on their children not merely or mostly to save those children from disaster — that to a certain extent and up to a certain age we must all do — but from possessiveness, from a … [ Read more ]
Author: Jane Ellen Harrison | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Life & Society, Relationships
Acting is sinking your own personality in order that you may mimic another’s. Masquerading is borrowing another’s personality, putting on the mask of another’s features, dress, experiences, emotions, and thereby enhancing your own… Youth, and especially shy Youth, is strongly possessed by the instinctive desire to masquerade.
[…]
Masquerading bores Crabbed Age. Why?
Simply because the impulse to imaginative self-enhancement dies down as soon as liberty to … [ Read more ]
Author: Jane Ellen Harrison | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Life & Society, Psychology | Behavior
The reasons by which people back up their prejudices are mostly negligible — not reason at all at bottom, but just instinctive self-justifications; but prejudice, rising as it does in emotion, has its roots in life and reality.
Author: Jane Ellen Harrison | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Thought | Inquiry
The gap between knowing what you want and going after it is where fear thrives. You don’t need enough courage for the entire journey. You only need courage for the next step.
Author: Shane Parrish | Source: Farnam Street | Subjects: Change, Concepts, Life & Society, Personal Improvement
I understand fully the limits of moral suasion. We have no illusion that changes will come easily or soon. But I also believe that it is a mistake to undervalue the power of words and of the ideas that words embody. In our own history, that power has ranged from Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense” to Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream.” In the … [ Read more ]
Author: Jimmy Carter | Source: The Atlantic | Subjects: Change, Communication, Concepts, Life & Society, Politics & Public Policy
Presence is far more intricate and rewarding an art than productivity. Ours is a culture that measures our worth as human beings by our efficiency, our earnings, our ability to perform this or that. The cult of productivity has its place, but worshipping at its altar daily robs us of the very capacity for joy and wonder that makes life worth living.
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement
As Maya Angelou famously advised, when people tell you who they are, believe them. Just as important, however, when people try to tell you who you are, don’t believe them. You are the only custodian of your own integrity, and the assumptions made by those that misunderstand who you are and what you stand for reveal a great deal about them and absolutely nothing about … [ Read more ]
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Advice, Personal Improvement, Relationships