You will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.
Author: Ralph Waldo Emerson | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subject: Personal Improvement
Anyone who honestly wants to be young again has never lived, only imagined, only masqueraded.
Author: Jane Ellen Harrison | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Experience, Life & Society
In trying to impose its experience as a law to youth [Old Age] sins not only through ignorance, but from sheer selfishness. Parents try to impose their view of life on their children not merely or mostly to save those children from disaster — that to a certain extent and up to a certain age we must all do — but from possessiveness, from a … [ Read more ]
Author: Jane Ellen Harrison | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Life & Society, Relationships
Acting is sinking your own personality in order that you may mimic another’s. Masquerading is borrowing another’s personality, putting on the mask of another’s features, dress, experiences, emotions, and thereby enhancing your own… Youth, and especially shy Youth, is strongly possessed by the instinctive desire to masquerade.
[…]
Masquerading bores Crabbed Age. Why?
Simply because the impulse to imaginative self-enhancement dies down as soon as liberty to … [ Read more ]
Author: Jane Ellen Harrison | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Life & Society, Psychology | Behavior
The reasons by which people back up their prejudices are mostly negligible — not reason at all at bottom, but just instinctive self-justifications; but prejudice, rising as it does in emotion, has its roots in life and reality.
Author: Jane Ellen Harrison | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Thought | Inquiry
I am long past blame and praise, or, rather, I am not yet ready for them; there is so much still waiting to be understood.
Author: Jane Ellen Harrison | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Wisdom
All of our creative work is our coping mechanism for life. Art is just what we call our instruments of self-salvation. It may touch other lives, salve and save them even, but it is always at bottom a private lifeline.
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subject: Art
All ideas are second-hand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources.
Author: Mark Twain | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Concepts, Creativity and Innovation
Take away from suffering its double drumbeat of resonance, memory and fear. Suffering may persist, but already it is relieved by half.
Author: Jacques Lusseyran | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Concepts, Pain & Suffering
Presence is far more intricate and rewarding an art than productivity. Ours is a culture that measures our worth as human beings by our efficiency, our earnings, our ability to perform this or that. The cult of productivity has its place, but worshipping at its altar daily robs us of the very capacity for joy and wonder that makes life worth living.
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement
As Maya Angelou famously advised, when people tell you who they are, believe them. Just as important, however, when people try to tell you who you are, don’t believe them. You are the only custodian of your own integrity, and the assumptions made by those that misunderstand who you are and what you stand for reveal a great deal about them and absolutely nothing about … [ Read more ]
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Advice, Personal Improvement, Relationships
Prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy. It causes you to work not on what you like, but what you’d like to like.
Author: Paul Graham | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior
The emotional life is not simply a part or an aspect of human life. It is not, as we so often think, subordinate, or subsidiary to the mind. It is the core and essence of human life. The intellect arises out of it, is rooted in it, draws its nourishment and sustenance from it, and is the subordinate partner in the human economy. This is … [ Read more ]
Author: John Macmurray | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Intelligence | Knowledge, Life & Society, Psychology | Behavior
In imagination we feel sure that it would be lovely to live with a full and rich awareness of the world. But in practice sensitiveness hurts. It is not possible to develop the capacity to see beauty without developing also the capacity to see ugliness, for they are the same capacity. The capacity for joy is also the capacity for pain. We soon find that … [ Read more ]
Author: John Macmurray | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Concepts, Life & Society, Pain & Suffering
Our existential predicament is that, governed by the reflex to spare ourselves pain, we blunt our sensitivity to life, thus impoverishing our creative vitality and our store of aliveness.
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Life & Society, Psychology | Behavior
Intellectual knowledge tells us about the world. it gives us knowledge about things, not knowledge of them. It does not reveal the world as it is. Only emotional knowledge can do that.
Author: John Macmurray | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Intelligence | Knowledge, Thought | Inquiry
The strength of our opposition to the development of reason is measured by the strength of our dislike of being disillusioned. We should all admit, if it were put to us directly, that it is good to get rid of illusions, but in practice the process of disillusionment is painful and disheartening. We all confess to the desire to get at the truth, but in … [ Read more ]
Author: John Macmurray | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Intelligence | Knowledge, Psychology | Behavior, Thought | Inquiry
The main difficulty that faces us in the development of a scientific knowledge of the world lies not in the outside world but in our own emotional life. It is the desire to retain beliefs to which we are emotionally attached for some reason or other. It is the tendency to make the wish father to the thought. .. If we are to be scientific … [ Read more ]
Author: John Macmurray | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Intelligence | Knowledge, Math & Science, Thought | Inquiry
We suffer primarily because we are so insentient to our own emotions, so illiterate in reading ourselves.
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Concepts, Education | Scholarship, Life & Society, Pain & Suffering, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior, Thought | Inquiry
We feel our way through life, then rationalize our actions, as if emotion were a shameful scar on the countenance of reason. […] Our emotional lives [are] the root of our motives beneath the topsoil of reason and rationalization.
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Life & Society, Psychology | Behavior