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

The reality of life is not sensation but activity — I mean activity both in thought and in action. People who live by sensations are parasites, both materially and morally, in relation to those who work and create… who do not seek sensations [but] experience in fact much livelier, profounder, less artificial and truer ones than those who seek them.

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The cultivation of sensations… leads … [ Read more ]

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

The art of poetry, like the art of living, is a matter of the quality of attention we pay to things.

Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Advice, Literature | Arts, Personal Improvement

Substantially 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

I consider it a grave misfortune if, in any period or nation, intelligence remains, practically speaking, reduced to the limits of the intellectual. Intelligence asserts itself above all not in art, nor in science, but in intuition of life. The intellectual, however, barely lives; they are usually a person with poverty of intuition; their acts in the world are few and they have very little … [ Read more ]

Author: José Ortega y Gasset | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Intelligence | Knowledge

It is undeniable that a large part of science and literature has been produced in a somnambulistic trance; that is to say, by creatures who are not at all intelligent… Science and literature, as such, do not imply perspicacity; but, undoubtedly, their cultivation is a stimulant which favors the awakening of the mind and preserves it in that luminous state of alertness which constitutes intelligence. … [ Read more ]

Author: José Ortega y Gasset | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Intelligence | Knowledge, Math & Science

Probably, humanity has almost always lived in this somnambulistic state in which ideas are not a wide-awake, conscious reaction to things, but a blind, automatic habit, drawn from a repertory of formulae which the atmosphere infuses into the individual.

Author: José Ortega y Gasset | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Concepts, Creativity and Innovation

The secret of a full life is to live and relate to others as if they might not be there tomorrow, as if you might not be there tomorrow. It eliminates the vice of procrastination, the sin of postponement, failed communications, failed communions. This thought has made me more and more attentive to all encounters, meetings, introductions, which might contain the seed of depth that … [ Read more ]

Author: Anaïs Nin | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Happiness, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior

You can’t expect somebody who loves you to treat you less cruelly than he would treat himself.

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

Personality is composed of two fundamentally different types of traits: those of ‘character;’ and those of ‘temperament.’ Your character traits stem from your experiences. Your childhood games; your family’s interests and values; how people in your community express love and hate; what relatives and friends regard as courteous or perilous; how those around you worship; what they sing; when they laugh; how they make a … [ Read more ]

Author: Helen Fisher | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subject: Psychology | Behavior

Science is an inherent contradiction — systematic wonder — applied to the natural world. In its mundane form, the methodical instinct prevails and the result, an orderly procession of papers, advances the perimeter of knowledge, step by laborious step. Great scientific minds partake of that daily discipline and can also suspend it, yielding to the sheer love of allowing the mental engine to spin free. … [ Read more ]

Authors: Fari Amini, Richard Lannon, Thomas Lewis | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subject: Math & Science

Who we are and who we become depends, in part, on whom we love.

Authors: Fari Amini, Richard Lannon, Thomas Lewis | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Concepts, Love, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior

Language is always a placeholder for a culture’s evolving understanding of itself, the space in which we work out our concepts as we learn how to think about them in learning how to speak of them.

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

Nothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom.

Author: James Baldwin | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Concepts, Freedom | Liberty

And yet, within these narrow parameters of being, nothing appeals to us more than the notion of freedom — the feeling that we are free, that intoxicating illusion with which we blunt the hard fact that we are not. The more abstract and ideological the realm, the more vehemently we can insist that moral choice in specific situations within narrow parameters proves a totality of … [ Read more ]

Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Concepts, Freedom | Liberty, Love

Understanding is love’s other name.

Author: Thich Nhat Hanh | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Concepts, Love

Of all the worn, smudged, dog-eared words in our vocabulary, “love” is surely the grubbiest, smelliest, slimiest. Bawled from a million pulpits, lasciviously crooned through hundreds of millions of loudspeakers, it has become an outrage to good taste and decent feeling, an obscenity which one hesitates to pronounce. And yet it has to be pronounced; for, after all, Love is the last word.

Author: Aldous Huxley | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Concepts, Love

Knowledge is acquired when we succeed in fitting a new experience into the system of concepts based upon our old experiences. Understanding comes when we liberate ourselves from the old and so make possible a direct, unmediated contact with the new, the mystery, moment by moment, of our existence.

Author: Aldous Huxley | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Intelligence | Knowledge, Personal Improvement

Because the units of knowledge are concepts, and concepts can be conveyed and transmitted in words and symbols, knowledge itself can be passed between persons. Understanding, on the other hand, is intimate and subjective, not a conceptual container but an aura of immediacy cast upon an experience — which means it cannot be transmitted and transacted like knowledge.

Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Intelligence | Knowledge

To understand anything — another person’s experience of reality, another fundamental law of physics — is to restructure our existing knowledge, shifting and broadening our prior frames of reference to accommodate a new awareness. And yet we have a habit of confusing our knowledge — which is always limited and incomplete: a model of the cathedral of reality, built from primary-colored blocks of fact — … [ Read more ]

Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Intelligence | Knowledge, Personal Improvement

Love-besotted men and women show all the basic symptoms of addiction. Foremost, the lover is stiletto-focused on his/her drug of choice, the love object. The lover thinks obsessively about him or her (intrusive thinking), and often compulsively calls, writes, or stays in touch. Paramount in this experience is intense motivation to win one’s sweetheart, not unlike the substance abuser fixated on the drug. Impassioned lovers … [ Read more ]

Author: Helen Fisher | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Concepts, Love, Psychology | Behavior