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

We can, with spiritual safety, rebel only in so far as we are personally sensitive to the claims of other individual lives that touch our own. The old herd-problem remains of how to live together; and as the union grows closer and more intricate the chances of mutual hurt are greater, and the sensitiveness must grow keener. Others are safe from and with us only … [ Read more ]

Author: Jane Ellen Harrison | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Life & Society, Relationships

Patriotism is collective herd-instinct; it is repressive of individuality. You feel strongly because you feel alike; you are reinforced by the other homogenous unites; you sing the same song and wave the same flag.

Author: Jane Ellen Harrison | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: International, Life & Society, Psychology | Behavior

Our bodies are sublime, rebellious colonies of cells and our minds are floating, chameleon-like processes. This doesn’t mean that we should see human life as meaningless. Thinking we are exceptional is different from thinking our lives have meaning. There’s every reason to believe that our sense of significance is something we can’t do without. But the weighing of human significance is less a fact of … [ Read more ]

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

The myth of human exceptionalism is as unsettling as it is irrational. The idea of our superiority runs with mercenary and sometimes aggressive features of our psychology. Being animal is a kind of syndrome for us, a peculiar combination of symptoms, emotions and opinions. It’s something we deny, manipulate as a weapon and seek to escape. At other times, being animal is given as a … [ Read more ]

Author: Melanie Challenger | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Insight, Life & Society, Psychology | Behavior

My experience is what I agree to attend to.

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

Human minds are not elusive, ghostly inner things. They are seething, swirling oceans of prediction, continuously orchestrated by brain, body, and world. We should be careful what kinds of material, digital, and social worlds we build, because in building those worlds we are building our own minds too.

Author: Andy Clark | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Advice, Education | Scholarship, Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Thought | Inquiry

Reality is not how the present self parses the world but how the Russian nesting doll of selves we carry — all the people we have ever been, with all the experiences we have ever had — constructs the world before its eyes. Our sensorium is a simulation we ourselves are constantly running.

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

Nothing we do or experience … is untouched by our own expectations. Instead, there is a constant give-and-take in which what we experience reflects not just what the world is currently telling us, but what we — consciously or nonconsciously — were expecting it to be telling us. One consequence of this is that we are never simply seeing what’s “really there,” stripped bare of … [ Read more ]

Author: Andy Clark | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Experience, Life & Society

We understand very little of what is happening to us at any given moment. But by remembering, comparing, waiting to know the consequences, we can sometimes see what an event really meant, what it was trying to teach us.

Author: Katherine Anne Porter | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement

Only art penetrates what pride, passion, intelligence and habit erect on all sides — the seeming realities of this world.

Author: Saul Bellow | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subject: Literature | Arts

Our universities fail to guide us down the easiest paths to wisdom… Rather than teaching a sense of awe, they teach the very opposite: counting and measuring over delight, sobriety over enchantment, a rigid hold on scattered individual parts over an affinity for the unified and whole. These are not schools of wisdom, after all, but schools of knowledge, though they take for granted that … [ Read more ]

Author: Hermann Hesse | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subject: Education | Scholarship

While we are born wakeful to wonder, our cultural conditioning and indoctrination — what we call our education — often schools us out of it.

Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Concepts, Creativity and Innovation, Education | Scholarship, Life & Society, Psychology | Behavior

Kurt Vonnegut exposed the taproot of our modern suffering as the gnawing sense that what we have is not enough, that what we are is not enough. This is our modern curse: A century of conspicuous consumption has trained us to be dutiful citizens of the Republic of Not Enough, swearing allegiance to the marketable myth of scarcity, hoarding toilet paper for the apocalypse. Along … [ Read more ]

Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Consumerism, Life & Society, Material Possessions

You will thrive more — and so will others — when you promote what you love rather than bash what you hate. Life is short; focus on the good stuff.

Author: Kevin Kelly | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Advice, Personal Improvement

If you are the smartest person in the room, you are in the wrong room. Hang out with, and learn from people smarter than yourself. Even better, find smart people who will disagree with you.

Author: Kevin Kelly | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Advice, Personal Improvement

Habit is far more dependable than inspiration. Make progress by making habits. Don’t focus on getting into shape. Focus on becoming the kind of person who never misses a workout.

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The purpose of a habit is to remove that action from self-negotiation. You no longer expend energy deciding whether to do it. You just do it. Good habits can range from telling the truth to … [ Read more ]

Author: Kevin Kelly | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Advice, Personal Improvement

Don’t measure your life with someone else’s ruler.

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The greatest killer of happiness is comparison. If you must compare, compare yourself to you yesterday.

Author: Kevin Kelly | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Advice, Personal Improvement

Anger is not the proper response to anger. When you see someone angry you are seeing their pain. Compassion is the proper response to anger.

Author: Kevin Kelly | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Advice, Personal Improvement

Whenever you have a choice between being right or being kind be kind. No exceptions. Don’t confuse kindness with weakness.

Author: Kevin Kelly | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Advice, Personal Improvement

How to apologize: quickly, specifically, sincerely. Don’t ruin an apology with an excuse.

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A proper apology consists of conveying the 3 Rs: regret (genuine empathy with the other) responsibility (not blaming someone else) and remedy (your willingness to fix it).

Author: Kevin Kelly | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subject: Personal Improvement