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
To watch the TV screen for any length of time is to learn some really frightening things about the American sense of reality. We are cruelly trapped between what we would like to be and what we actually are. And we cannot possibly become what we would like to be until we are willing to ask ourselves just why the lives we lead on this … [ Read more ]
Author: James Baldwin | Subjects: America, International, Life & Society, Race Relations, Sociology | Anthropology
For love that seeks aught but the disclosure of its own mystery is not love but a net cast forth: and only the unprofitable is caught.
Author: Kahlil Gibran | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Concepts, Love
One reason so few of us achieve what we truly want is that we never direct our focus; we never concentrate our power. Most people dabble their way through life, never deciding to master anything in particular.
Author: Tony Robbins | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Productivity & Time Management, Success / Failure
Someone who hates one group will end up hating everyone – and, ultimately, hating himself or herself.
Author: Elie Wiesel | Subjects: Concepts, Love, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior
Don’t fall in love with someone who says the right things. Fall in love with someone who does the right things.
Author: Unknown | Subjects: Concepts, Love, Personal Improvement, Relationships
It’s easy for age to misremember the passions of youth, to muffle the grief of the past. It’s even easier for age to stand atop the soap box and proffer wise and useless advice.
Author: Kim McLarin | Subjects: Experience, Life & Society, Perception | Observation
Freedom and love go together. Love is not a reaction. If I love you because you love me, that is mere trade, a thing to be bought in the market; it is not love. To love is not to ask anything in return, not even to feel that you are giving something — and it is only such love that can know freedom.
Author: Jiddu Krishnamurti | Subjects: Concepts, Freedom | Liberty, Love
When you call yourself an Indian or a Muslim or a Christian or a European, or anything else, you are being violent. Do you see why it is violent? Because you are separating yourself from the rest of mankind. When you separate yourself by belief, by nationality, by tradition, it breeds violence. So a man who is seeking to understand violence does not belong to … [ Read more ]
Author: Jiddu Krishnamurti | Subject: Life & Society
All the good in a man, for which he is praised or loved, is merely good suffering, the right kind, the living kind of suffering, a suffering to the full. The ability to suffer well is more than half of life — indeed, it is all life.
Author: Hermann Hesse | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Concepts, Life & Society, Meaning, Pain & Suffering
Progress is never permanent, will always be threatened, must be redoubled, restated and reimagined if it is to survive.
Author: Zadie Smith | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Politics & Public Policy
If we trust only when trust is warranted, love only when love is returned, and learn only when learning is valuable, then we abandon an essential feature of our humanity.
Author: James G. March | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Learning, Love, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior, Trust, Wisdom
It is desirable for us to know what price we have paid for the creation of this incomparable engine of social influence: we have certainly created a habit of almost indiscriminate, almost apathetic listening; through the air has come a really incalculable number of stupidities; much that is trite and tasteless comes with what is intelligent and bright. A critic of society would have a … [ Read more ]
Author: Gilbert Seldes | Subjects: Communication, Culture, IT | Technology
Man is perishable. That may be; but let us perish resisting, and, if nothingness is what awaits us, let us not act in such a way that it would be a just fate.
Author: Etienne Pivert de Senancour | Subjects: Life & Society, Wisdom
Prejudice can be detected, discounted, and refined, but so long as finite men must compress into a short schooling preparation for dealing with a vast civilization, they must carry pictures of it around with them, and have prejudices. The quality of their thinking and doing will depend on whether those prejudices are friendly, friendly to other people, to other ideas, whether they evoke love of … [ Read more ]
Author: Walter Lippmann | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Life & Society, Prejudice and Stereotype, Psychology | Behavior
The great tragedy of human society […] is that those in power are reluctant to hold stereotypes lightly and modify them gladly, because stereotypes are how they stake out their place in the world and maintain the world-order that is the source of their power.
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Life & Society, Power, Prejudice and Stereotype
We are told about the world before we see it. We imagine most things before we experience them. And those preconceptions, unless education has made us acutely aware, govern deeply the whole process of perception. They mark out certain objects as familiar or strange, emphasizing the difference, so that the slightly familiar is seen as very familiar, and the somewhat strange as sharply alien… Were … [ Read more ]
Author: Walter Lippmann | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Life & Society, Perception | Observation, Prejudice and Stereotype, Psychology | Behavior, Thought | Inquiry
Those whom we love and admire most are the men and women whose consciousness is peopled thickly with persons rather than with types, who know us rather than the classification into which we might fit. For even without phrasing it to ourselves, we feel intuitively that all classification is in relation to some purpose not necessarily our own; that between two human beings no association … [ Read more ]
Author: Walter Lippmann | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Prejudice and Stereotype, Relationships
For the most part we do not first see, and then define, we define first and then see. In the great blooming, buzzing confusion of the outer world we pick out what our culture has already defined for us, and we tend to perceive that which we have picked out in the form stereotyped for us by our culture.
Author: Walter Lippmann | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Culture, Life & Society, Prejudice and Stereotype, Thought | Inquiry
Self-control is a means to controlling other people. So is self-classification. The feeling of having our class back of us gives us self-assurance… we enhance our sense of power. Similarly, by declassifying or demoting others or by suspending their regular classification, so to speak, we get a pleasurable sense of our own power.
Author: Elsie Clews Parsons | Subjects: Life & Society, Power, Psychology | Behavior