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
There is nothing which is so weak for working purposes as this enormous importance attached to immediate victory. There is nothing that fails like success.
Author: G. K. Chesterton | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Personal Improvement, Success / Failure
To lose the appetite for meaning we call thinking and cease to ask unanswerable questions [would be to] lose not only the ability to produce those thought-things that we call works of art but also the capacity to ask all the answerable questions upon which every civilization is founded.
Author: Hannah Arendt | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Art, Concepts, Intelligence | Knowledge, Thought | Inquiry
When we surrender the grandest, often unanswerable questions to the false certitudes of the smallest, we lose something essential of our humanity. When we aim the spears of those certitudes at one another, more interested in being right than in understanding, we lose something essential.
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Concepts, Intelligence | Knowledge
If the American Negro has arrived at his identity by virtue of the absoluteness of his estrangement from his past, American white men still nourish the illusion that there is some means of recovering the European innocence, of returning to a state in which black men do not exist. This is one of the greatest errors Americans can make. The identity they fought so hard … [ Read more ]
Author: James Baldwin | Subjects: America, History, International, Race Relations
Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.
Author: James Baldwin | Subjects: Change, Concepts, Personal Improvement
No kingdom can maintain itself by force alone. Force does not work the way its advocates seem to think it does. It does not, for example, reveal to the victim the strength of his adversary. On the contrary, it reveals the weakness, even the panic of his adversary, and this revelation invests the victim with passion.
Author: James Baldwin | Subjects: Concepts, Power
For a very long time America prospered. This prosperity cost millions of people their lives. Now, not even the people who are the most spectacular recipients of the benefits of this prosperity are able to endure these benefits. They can neither understand them, nor do without them. Above all, they cannot imagine the price paid by their victims or subjects for that way of life. … [ Read more ]
Author: James Baldwin | Subjects: America, International
All of the western nations have been caught in a lie, the lie of their pretended humanism. This means that their history has no moral justification, and that the West has no moral authority.
Author: James Baldwin | Subjects: History, International
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
When you see someone doing something that doesn’t make sense to you, ask yourself what the world would have to look like to you for those actions to make sense.
Authors: Rhiannon Beaubien, Shane Parrish | Subjects: Perspective, Psychology | Behavior
Try as we might not to be blinded by society’s prescriptions for happiness, we are still social creatures porous to the values of our peers — creatures surprisingly and often maddeningly myopic about the things we believe furnish our completeness as human beings, habitually aspiring to the wrong things for the wrong reasons. – Maria Popova
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Happiness, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior
So I had finally come to the conclusion that my task was to become more and more aware, more and more understanding with an understanding that was not at all the same thing as intellectual comprehension. […] Without understanding, I was at the mercy of blind habit; with understanding, I could develop my own rules for living and find out which of the conflicting exhortations … [ Read more ]
Author: Marion Milner | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings)
I had just begun to ponder over the fact that all the things which I had found to be sources of happiness seemed to depend upon the capacity to relax all straining, to widen my attention beyond the circle of personal interest, and to look detachedly at my own experience. I had just realized that this relaxing and detachment must depend on a fundamental sense … [ Read more ]
Author: Marion Milner | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subject: Psychology | Behavior
People said: “Oh, be yourself at all costs.” But I had found that it was not so easy to know just what one’s self was. It was far easier to want what other people seemed to want and then imagine that the choice was one’s own.
Author: Marion Milner | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subject: Personal Improvement
If just looking could be so satisfying, why was I always striving to have things or to get things done? Certainly I had never suspected that the key to my private reality might lie in so apparently simple a skill as the ability to let the senses roam unfettered by purposes. I began to wonder whether eyes and ears might not have a wisdom of … [ Read more ]
Author: Marion Milner | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subject: Senses
Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence.
Author: Robert Frost | Subject: Education | Scholarship
Impossible is just a big word thrown around by small men who find it easier to live the world they’ve been given than to explore the power they have to change it. Impossible is not a fact. It’s an opinion. Impossible is not a declaration. It’s a dare. Impossible is potential. Impossible is temporary. Impossible is nothing.
Author: John Maxwell | Subjects: Ability | Skill, Action | Accomplishment, Advice, Concepts, Personal Improvement, Possibility, Psychology | Behavior
At times of crisis, it is not always easy to know if being brave and being right are the same thing: The line between bravery and foolishness can be thin and it is often only with hindsight that we know which actions were, in the end, the correct ones. But I still say: Be brave, do something, take action. Understand that afterward, when you are … [ Read more ]
Author: Peter van Uhm | Subjects: Action | Accomplishment, Advice, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior
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