2098 Quotations Found

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

Don’t deal with people about whose character there is question. It keeps your mind uneasy. It is far better to lose the business.

Author: Alexander Brown | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Business, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior, Relationships

Most conversations fall into one of three buckets: emotional, practical, and social. In emotional conversations, we want to talk about our feelings. In practical conversations, we want to solve a problem or create a plan together, and in social, we want to talk about how we relate to each other and how society relates to us.

Author: Charles Duhigg | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Communication, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior, Relationships

We tend to measure performance by what happens when things are going well. Yet how people, organizations, companies, leaders, and other things do on their best day isn’t all that instructive. To find the truth, we need to look at what happens on the worst day.

Author: Shane Parrish | Source: Farnam Street | Subjects: Personal Improvement, Success / Failure

Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure.

Author: Andy Grove | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Personal Improvement, Success / Failure

All of us spend so much of our lives trying to make our future selves happy. We don’t stop to ask if it is possible that in 20 or 30 years our future selves are going to look back at us with bewilderment, with resentment, that our future selves will ask us, what made you think that is what I would want?

[…]

I believe if … [ Read more ]

Author: Shankar Vedantam | Source: TED | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior

When we look backwards, we can see enormous changes in who we have become. But when we look forwards, we tend to imagine that we are going to be the same people in the future. Sure, we imagine that the world will be different… but we don’t imagine that we ourselves will have different perspectives, different views, different preferences in the future. I call this … [ Read more ]

Author: Shankar Vedantam | Source: TED | Subject: Psychology | Behavior

Jung argued that a good life requires a way of understanding why things happen the way they do, being able to zoom out from the tedious quotidian travails of life, and put events—including inevitable suffering—into perspective… He did not insist that his spiritual path was the only one… and allowed that even a nonreligious, purely philosophical attitude could do. But everyone, he thought, should have … [ Read more ]

Author: Arthur C. Brooks | Source: The Atlantic | Subjects: Personal Improvement, Religion

Negative and positive emotions appear to be separable phenomena and not opposites; well-being requires a focus on each.

Author: Arthur C. Brooks | Source: The Atlantic | Subjects: Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior

It’s easier to act your way into a new way of thinking than to think your way into a new way of acting.

Authors: Augusto Giacoman, Dave Eberhardt | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Action | Accomplishment, Education | Scholarship, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior, Thought | Inquiry

The self-limitation of control is the cage of howling loneliness that keeps us from the freedom necessary for love… That mysterious aspect of love — unreachable by logic and reason, impervious to will and control — is why our choice in love is largely an illusion, why our slender margin of choice contains only the courage and patience with which we face its trembling uncertainty … [ Read more ]

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

Feeling is what gives valence and meaning to experience.

Author: William James | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Experience, Life & Society, Psychology | Behavior

There’s a big optimism gap between how people feel about their own lives—which is about 6.5 out of 10, on average—and how they feel about the world, which is much more like 4 [out of 10]. And I think the antidote is [to realize] that 100,150 years ago, the average lifespan was in the 40s; now it’s in the low 80s. Malnourishment; access to clean … [ Read more ]

Author: Martin Seligman | Source: GQ | Subjects: Life & Society, Perception | Observation, Psychology | Behavior, Sociology | Anthropology

More than half the time, adults are planning futures. And so, the notion that we should live more and more in the moment denies what, evolutionarily, we’re really good at. What distinguishes human beings from all of the other animals is that we’re creatures of the future. We’re not Homo sapiens—“sapiens” is wisdom and knowledge. I’m not impressed by our wisdom and knowledge. But I … [ Read more ]

Author: Martin Seligman | Source: GQ | Subject: Psychology | Behavior