360 Posts found for Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings)

We can never establish with certainty what part of our relations with others is the result of our emotion — love, antipathy, charity, or malice — and what part is predetermined by the constant power play among individuals.

True human goodness, in all its purity and freedom, can come to the fore only when its recipient has no power. Mankind’s true moral test, its fundamental test … [ Read more ]

Author: Milan Kundera | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Concepts, Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Power, Psychology | Behavior, Relationships

At the heart of this murderous self-importance is our troubled relationship to power — the power within and between selves, its confused uses and abuses, its role as a mirror for our emotional incompleteness. Out of it arises the entire dynamic system we call society and all the inner turmoil of discerning where we end and the world begins.

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

It is a question of the spirit. Why are we a nation? We are a nation which must be built up according to a living idea, a great architecture of living people, which shall express the greatest truth of which we are capable… A bad spirit in a nation chooses a bad spirit in a governor. We must begin to choose all afresh, for the … [ Read more ]

Author: D.H. Lawrence | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subject: Articles & Links

The Conservative either wants to bully or to be bullied.

Author: D.H. Lawrence | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subject: Politics & Public Policy

The paradox of progress is that because there is no universal utopia — every utopia is built on someone’s back — there can be no universal progress, no absolute measure of it. Its relativism conceals a euphemism for moving the world in the direction of one’s own desires, relativism laced with myriad hypocrisies.

Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: History, Life & Society, Politics & Public Policy

Progress is never permanent, will always be threatened, must be redoubled, restated and reimagined if it is to survive.

Author: Zadie Smith | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: History, Life & Society, Politics & Public Policy

The teeming hordes of living things on Earth, not only in space but in time, are actually all one massive, single organism just as certainly as each one of us (in our own minds) seems to be a distinct human being throughout our limited lifetime… Each of us is, equally, an independent living human and also just one utterly minute, utterly brief unit of a … [ Read more ]

Author: Neil Theise | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subject: Life & Society

Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.

Author: Simone Weil | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior, Relationships

We have a great, habitual fear inside ourselves. We’re afraid of many things — of our own death, of losing our loved ones, of change, of being alone. The practice of mindfulness helps us to touch nonfear. It’s only here and now that we can experience total relief, total happiness… In the practice of Buddhism, we see that all mental formations — including compassion, love, … [ Read more ]

Author: Thich Nhat Hanh | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement

Fearlessness is what love seeks. Such fearlessness exists only in the complete calm that can no longer be shaken by events expected of the future… Hence the only valid tense is the present, the Now.

Author: Hannah Arendt | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Life & Society, Love, Relationships

The self, the place where we live, is a place of illusion. Goodness is connected with the attempt to see the unself… to pierce the veil of selfish consciousness and join the world as it really is.

Author: Iris Murdoch | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Life & Society, Psychology | Behavior

There are more things … likely to frighten us than there are to crush us; we suffer more often in imagination than in reality. …some things torment us more than they ought; some torment us before they ought; and some torment us when they ought not to torment us at all. We are in the habit of exaggerating, or imagining, or anticipating, sorrow.

Author: Seneca | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior

What we see is never raw reality, pure as spacetime — what we see is our interpretation of reality, filtered through the lens of our experience and our conditioned worldview. Always, the way we look at things shapes what we see; often, the lens we mistake for a magnifying glass turns out to be a warped mirror — we see others not as they are … [ Read more ]

Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Life & Society, Perception | Observation, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior, Relationships

We are untender with each other because we cannot bear the terrifying difficulty of being human, vulnerable and perishable as we are.

Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subject: Psychology | Behavior

We will lose everything we love, including our lives — so we might as well love without fear, for to fear a certainty is wasted energy that syphons life of aliveness.

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

Uncertainty is the price of beauty, and integrity the only compass for the territory of uncertainty that constitutes the landmass of any given life. And so the best we can do is walk step by next intuitively right step until one day, pausing to catch our breath, we turn around and gasp at a path. If we have been lucky enough, if we have been … [ Read more ]

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

The unrest you feel will always have more to do with you than with what’s around you.

Author: Pico Iyer | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior

Nothing kidnaps our capacity for presence more cruelly than longing. And yet longing is also the most powerful creative force we know: Out of our longing for meaning came all of art; out of our longing for truth all of science; out of our longing for love the very fact of life. We may give this undertone of being different names […] but we recognize … [ Read more ]

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

Everywhere we learn that love is important, and yet we are bombarded by its failure… This bleak picture in no way alters the nature of our longing. We still hope that love will prevail. We still believe in love’s promise… Our hope lies in the reality that so many of us continue to believe in love’s power. We believe it is important to know love. … [ Read more ]

Author: Bell Hooks | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Life & Society, Love, Psychology | Behavior, Relationships

For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.

Author: Rainer Maria Rilke | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Life & Society, Love, Relationships