850 Quotations Found

It seems clear that the more we exercise our sensitivity, the stronger it becomes… When it is not exercised, sensitivity tends to weaken… How important it must be, therefore, to exercise children’s sensitivity to the point where it will continue to develop as much as it is capable of — so that it can no longer be dulled by those things in life that tend … [ Read more ]

Author: Sophie de Grouchy | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Life & Society, Personal Improvement

The media gives us what we want: something to fear, the scary thing, the dark thing. That’s what’s going to attract our attention. Also, we have a huge confirmation bias. If you’re afraid of…[something], you’ll be attracted to information that reinforces the fear.

[…]

I guess it would be an open question: If the media is playing to our inherent natures, is that our fault or … [ Read more ]

Author: Christopher Bader | Source: The New York Times | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Life & Society, News | Media | Publishing

Whatever a human being desires for themselves will not come about exactly as they first imagined it or first laid it out in their minds… what always happens is the meeting between what you desire from your world and what the world desires of you. It’s this frontier where you overhear yourself and you overhear the world. And that frontier is the only place where … [ Read more ]

Author: David Whyte | Subject: Life & Society

Relationships involve conflicts that can lead either to intimacy or distance, to bonding or rupturing, depending on how you handle them. How you negotiate conflict may prove to be the single most important indicator of your compatibility.

Author: Daniel Jones | Source: The New York Times | Subjects: Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior, Relationships

A positive engagement to marry a certain person at a certain time, at all haps and hazards, I have always considered the most ridiculous thing on earth: it is either altogether useless or altogether miserable; if the parties continue faithfully attached to each other it is a mere ceremony — if otherwise it comes a galling fetter riveting them to wretchedness and only to be … [ Read more ]

Author: Jane Welsh Carlyle | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Love, Psychology | Behavior, Relationships

[A] public figure’s persona is a collectively created construct. It’s built by the celebrity and what they present to the media and the public, and then built by the media and the public and how they interpret and interact with the famous person. Once fans have created a personal parasocial relationship with their celebrity of choice, they will project whatever positive attributes they want onto … [ Read more ]

Author: Aja Romano | Source: Vox | Subjects: Life & Society, Politics & Public Policy, Psychology | Behavior

When we’re emotionally invested not only in the narrative being bolstered by the truth-teller but in the chosen truth-teller themselves, it becomes even harder to extricate an “objective” version of reality from the version they’re dispensing because the stakes feel so high.

Author: Aja Romano | Source: Vox | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Life & Society, Politics & Public Policy, Psychology | Behavior, Thought | Inquiry

[Truth depends] on the assumption that certain actors tell the truth, and that these actors have been authorized with the mantle of veracity in their understandings of the world and of themselves.

Author: Sarah Banet-Weiser | Source: Vox | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Life & Society, Thought | Inquiry

We understand our world less through reasoned deliberation of facts, and more through stories and symbols and metaphors.

Author: Stephen Duncombe | Source: Vox | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Facts | Bias, Intelligence | Knowledge, Learning, Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior

No territory of life exposes both our power and our vulnerability more brightly than a beginning.

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

The world will ask you who you are, and if you don’t know, the world will tell you.

Author: Carl Jung | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement

Purpose and meaning are not inherent to the universe but our own creation… all of our reckonings with the nature of reality are a mirror we hold up to ourselves.

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

As we steer a course through the river of our lives, we are affected by innumerable forces, the vast majority unknown to us. By some accounts this makes of our freedom an illusion, for how can we purport to freely choose when we can’t even see a fraction of the legion of influences acting on us, limiting our movements, sparking our appetites? The threat this … [ Read more ]

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

To love without knowing how to love wounds the person we love.

Author: Thich Nhat Hanh | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Love, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior, Relationships

Nothing does more damage in love than a paucity of self-knowledge.

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

As Michael Caulfield, an information researcher at the University of Washington, has argued, “The primary use of ‘misinformation’ is not to change the beliefs of other people at all. Instead, the vast majority of misinformation is offered as a service for people to maintain their beliefs in face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.” This distinction is important, in part because it assigns agency to … [ Read more ]

Authors: Charlie Warzel, Michael Caulfield | Source: The Atlantic | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Life & Society, Politics & Public Policy, Psychology | Behavior

We live in a culture that idealizes the idea of love, and the idea that there is one true person who will complete you, fulfill all your dreams and love you forever. We are told from an early age that our true love is out there, waiting for us and so we yearn to find them, to know what it feels like to experience true … [ Read more ]

Author: Roxane Gay | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Love, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior, Relationships

We mistake much for love – admiration, attraction, need. We fumble and fall again and again into the treacherous abyss between the idea of love – an idea baggaged with millennia of cultural mythologies – and the reality of love, with all its work and responsibility.

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

Bringing good things into your life, whether love, career success, or something else, usually involves risk. Risk doesn’t necessarily make us happy, and a risky life is going to bring disappointment. But it can also bring bigger rewards than a life played safe.

Author: Arthur C. Brooks | Source: The Atlantic | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Risk

Without even realizing it, many internet users mistakenly assume that cyberattackers follow conventional rules of behavior. People try to reason with trolls or appeal to their better nature. These responses are similar to how you might approach a friend who’s inadvertently insulted you, or a family member who disagrees with you about something important. But trolls are not like your loved ones, and research shows … [ Read more ]

Author: Arthur C. Brooks | Source: The Atlantic | Subjects: Life & Society, Social Media