Jealousy is self-confirming; it breeds itself… In no simple way (such as: OK, I was wrong all along) will this state of torment and anguish give up its claims or its existence.
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The imagination not to imagine is an important power of intelligence disabled here by the seeming necessities of obsession.
Author: Leslie Farber | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Love, Psychology | Behavior, Relationships
Jealousy is precisely love’s contrary… the most passionate form of egotism, the glorification of a despotic, exacting, and vain ego, which can neither forget nor subordinate itself.
Author: Henri-Frédéric Amiel | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Love, Psychology | Behavior, Relationships
There is another affliction of passion which may be seen as a companion obsession to jealousy; that is the state called being-in-love. Unlike jealousy, about which, to my mind, there is really nothing redeeming to be said, being-in-love does have pleasures, even virtues, which can survive its transformation into some more reasonable relation. But the state of being-in-love itself is strikingly similar to jealousy. The … [ Read more ]
Author: Leslie Farber | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Love, Psychology | Behavior, Relationships
As the child grows gradually aware of the absolute separateness of his being from all other beings in the world, he discovers that this condition offers both pleasure and terror. On the one hand he cherishes his separate, individual, regal self, and on the other he yearns for the loneliness of his autonomy to be relieved by relation with others. The manner in which he … [ Read more ]
Author: Leslie Farber | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Psychology | Behavior, Relationships
The experience of jealousy always includes so strong a conviction of being injured that it is most unusual for the jealous person to be able to consider the injury his jealousy causes others. For this reason, the real guilt that is jealousy’s inevitable consequence is seldom acknowledged by a jealous person; it is obliterated by his overriding absorption in his own injury.
Author: Leslie Farber | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Love, Psychology | Behavior, Relationships
The first thing to learn in intercourse with others is non-interference with their own peculiar ways of being happy, provided those ways do not assume to interfere by violence with ours. No one has insight into all the ideals. No one should presume to judge them off-hand. The pretension to dogmatize about them in each other is the root of most human injustices and cruelties, … [ Read more ]
Author: William James | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Prejudice and Stereotype, Psychology | Behavior, Relationships
The discipline of countering our reflex for self-righteousness is a triumph of existential maturity — one increasingly rare in a culture where most people would rather armor themselves with judgment than tremble with uncertainty, would rather be right than understand.
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Communication, Education | Scholarship, Life & Society, Politics & Public Policy, Psychology | Behavior
It is only in these bonds that our individuality has a use and a worth; it is only to the people who know us, love us, and depend on us that we are indispensable as the persons we uniquely are… Separate from the relationships, there is nobody to be known.
Author: Wendell Berry | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Individuality, Psychology | Behavior, Relationships
The problem, of course, is that we are not the authors of ourselves. That we are not is a religious perception, but it is also a biological and a social one. Each of us has had many authors, and each of us is engaged, for better or worse, in that same authorship. We could say that the human race is a great coauthorship in which … [ Read more ]
Author: Wendell Berry | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Concepts, Individuality, Life & Society, Meaning, Psychology | Behavior
Love can harm as much as it heals. It’s an amplifier. It makes a good relationship better and a bad relationship much worse.
Author: Mark Manson | Subjects: Love, Psychology | Behavior, Relationships
The most valuable things in life compound over a long period of time. I’m talking about health, wealth, knowledge, confidence, relationships. These things will frustrate you when you’re young because they are slow. But if you start building them from a young age and you don’t stop, by the time you’re in your 30s and 40s you will have an incredible life.
Author: Mark Manson | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement
Your relationship with others is a direct reflection of your relationship with yourself. Get right with yourself, get right with the world.
Author: Mark Manson | Subjects: Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior, Relationships
[Oliver Burkeman recommends] abandoning the delusion that time is something you can manage successfully. Trying to live as efficiently as possible, Burkeman argues, is both futile and self-defeating. There is always more to do, always another small task to complete, and, paradoxically, the better we get at completing tasks, the faster new ones arise. Obsessing over time management therefore means spending your time trying, and … [ Read more ]
Authors: James Surowiecki, Oliver Burkeman | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Productivity & Time Management
Desiring something is, without doubt, a move toward possession of that something (“possession” meaning that in some way or other the object should enter our orbit and become part of us). For this reason, desire automatically dies when it is fulfilled; it ends with satisfaction… One may sometimes grow to love what he desires: we desire what we love, because we love it.
Author: José Ortega y Gasset | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Desires, Love, Psychology | Behavior
Desire is often so difficult to distinguish from love because it is rooted in longing, but longing exists only in absence and evaporates at the moment of attainment, while love grows more saturated the more presence and energy it is given.
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Desires, Love, Psychology | Behavior
Love, strictly speaking, is pure sentimental activity toward an object, which can be anything — person or thing. As a “sentimental” activity, it remains, on the one hand, separated from all intellectual functions — perception, consideration, thought, recall, imagination — and, on the other hand, from desire, with which it is often confused. A glass of water is desired, but is not loved, when one … [ Read more ]
Author: José Ortega y Gasset | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Love, Psychology | Behavior
All love passes through the frantic zone of “falling in love”; but, on the other hand, “falling in love” is not always followed by genuine love. Let us, therefore, not confuse the part with the whole.
Author: José Ortega y Gasset | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Love, Psychology | Behavior, Relationships
Loving something is not simply “being,” but acting toward that which is loved… Love itself is, by nature, a transitive act in which we exert ourselves on behalf of what we love.
Author: José Ortega y Gasset | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Love, Psychology | Behavior, Relationships
It would be outlandish to conclude that, after being consistently wrong in our dealings with reality, we should hit the mark in love alone. The projection of imaginary qualities upon a real object is a constant phenomenon… To see things — moreover, to appreciate them! — always means to complete them… Strictly speaking, no one sees things in their naked reality.
Author: José Ortega y Gasset | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Love, Psychology | Behavior, Relationships
It is a strange thing, desire — so fiery yet so forlorn, aimed at having and animated by lack. In its restlessness and its pointedness, so single of focus, it shares psychic territory with addiction. Its Latin root — dē + sidus, “away from one’s star” — bespeaks its disorientation, its rush of longing, which we so easily mistake for love. And yet, when unplugged … [ Read more ]
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Desires, Love, Psychology | Behavior, Relationships