When you love someone you do not love them all the time, in exactly the same way, from moment to moment. It is an impossibility. It is even a lie to pretend to. And yet this is exactly what most of us demand. We have so little faith in the ebb and flow of life, of love, of relationships. We leap at the flow of … [ Read more ]
Author: Anne Morrow Lindbergh | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Love, Psychology | Behavior, Relationships
The twin root of our suffering in a changing relationship is the expectation — the demand, even — that the other’s love be total and permanent, reserved for us alone, unshared with other priorities and passions, those natural constituents of a fully developed personality and a fully inhabited life.
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Love, Psychology | Behavior
[Time] is the elementary particle of presence and the fundamental unit of attention — the two most precious resources we have, out of which every meaningful experiences is welded. To give a practice your time is an act of devotion. To give a person your time is a supreme act of love.
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Productivity & Time Management
The historian Bernard Lewis once offered sage advice to any group that faces adverse circumstances: “The question, ‘Who did this to us?’ has led only to neurotic fantasies and conspiracy theories. The other question—‘What did we do wrong?’—has led naturally to a second question, ‘How do we put it right?’ In that question … lie[s] the best hope for the future.”
Author: David Frum | Source: The Atlantic | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Politics & Public Policy
In our longing for certainty we keep propping ourselves up from the elemental wobbliness of life on the crutch of opinion. Few things are more seductive to us than a ready opinion, and we brandish few things more flagrantly as we move through the world, slicing through its fundamental uncertainty with our insecure certitudes.
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior
Meaning is the symbolic value of something, while purpose is a goal… Thus, to mean something is to have value and significance. To have a purpose, however, means to bring value to something, to make something significant. In other words, purpose can guide life decisions, influence behavior, shape goals, offer a sense of direction, as well as create meaning. It has a future connotation. In … [ Read more ]
Author: Manfred Kets de Vries | Source: Insead Knowledge | Subjects: Concepts, Life & Society, Meaning, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior
To be human is to long for constancy, to crave the touchingly impossible assurance that what we have and cherish will be ours to hold forever, just as it is now. We build homes — fragile haikus of concrete and glass to be unwritten by the first earthquake or flood. We make vows — fragile promises to be upheld by selves we haven’t met in … [ Read more ]
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Life & Society, Psychology | Behavior
The thing that is least perceived about wealth is that all pleasure in money ends at the point where economy becomes unnecessary. The man who can buy anything he covets values nothing that he buys. There is a subtle pleasure in the extravagance that contests with prudence; in the anxious debates which we hold with ourselves whether we can or cannot afford a certain thing; … [ Read more ]
Author: William Dawson | Subjects: Consumerism, Economics | Economy, Life & Society, Psychology | Behavior
How do we practice deceit? We rip the truth apart and reweave it into the lie. Nothing is more convincing.
Author: Altered Carbon | Subjects: Communication, Concepts, Ethics | Integrity | Morality, Life & Society, Politics & Public Policy
Rose Kennedy once told me that good luck is something you make and bad luck is something you endure, a very wise observation indeed. People do make their luck by daring to follow their instincts, taking risks, and embracing every possibility.
Author: Estée Lauder | Source: Farnam Street | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement
Most of our psychological suffering and most of the pain we inflict on others stem from our confusion about what we want and all the consequent clumsiness with which we go after it.
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Desires, Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior, Relationships
No man knows how much he is an optimist, even when he calls himself a pessimist, because he has not really measured the depths of his debt to whatever created him and enabled him to call himself anything. At the back of our brains… [there is] a forgotten blaze or burst of astonishment at our own existence. The object of the artistic and spiritual life … [ Read more ]
Author: G. K. Chesterton | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Life & Society, Psychology | Behavior
Ignorance, allied with power, is the most ferocious enemy justice can have.
Author: James Baldwin | Subjects: Concepts, Law | Legal, Life & Society, Politics & Public Policy, Power
In the world of science, we endeavor to uncover fundamental laws and elemental truths indifferent to our opinions of them — those selfsame truths and laws that made us and govern the electrical impulses coursing through our cortices at 100 meters per second to forge the thought-patterns of opinion. But in the human world where we live, we swirl in the movable host of human … [ Read more ]
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Concepts, Education | Scholarship, Ethics | Integrity | Morality, Life & Society, Math & Science, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior, Sociology | Anthropology
Few things are more important in life than avoiding the wrong people.
It’s tempting to think that we are strong enough to avoid adopting the worst of others, but that’s not how it typically works.
We unconsciously become what we’re near. If you work for a jerk, sooner or later, you’ll become one yourself. If your colleagues are selfish, sooner or later, you become selfish. If you … [ Read more ]
Author: Shane Parrish | Source: Farnam Street | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior
For us, ultra-social human beings, all you need to do to maintain a culture is put in place the pain of social exclusion. Follow the norms, and if you don’t, we’re not going to beat you to a pulp. We’re just going to exclude you. That is legitimately and truly painful to human beings. That’s the glue that holds human cultures together, is that threat … [ Read more ]
Author: Andrew McAfee | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Life & Society, Psychology | Behavior, Relationships, Sociology | Anthropology
We can’t choose where we come from, but we can choose where we are going.
Author: Stephen Chbosky | Source: The Perks of Being a Wallflower | Subjects: Change, Concepts, Life & Society, Personal Improvement
We accept the love we think we deserve.
Author: Stephen Chbosky | Source: The Perks of Being a Wallflower | Subjects: Love, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior, Relationships
Young people can also be remarkably clannish, and cruel in their exclusion of all those who are “different,” in skin color or cultural background, in tastes and gifts, and often in such petty aspects of dress and gesture as have been temporarily selected as the signs of an in-grouper or out-grouper. It is important to understand (which does not mean condone or participate in) such … [ Read more ]
Author: Erik Erikson | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Life & Society, Psychology | Behavior, Relationships, Sociology | Anthropology
Capitalism has a way of hijacking our culture’s best ideas. Regardless of the domain, industry turns almost every promising movement into a product.
Author: Sean Illing | Source: Vox | Subjects: Consumerism, Economics | Economy, Life & Society