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

We know the self is constructed because it can be so easily deconstructed — through damage, disease, and drugs. It must be an emergent property of a parallel system processing input, output, and internal representations. It’s an illusion because it feels so real, but that experience is not what it seems. The same is true for free will. Although we can experience the mental anguish … [ Read more ]

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

You live in a democracy — this halfway house between nightmare and utopia — which throws fewer obstacles in the way of an individual than its alternatives.

Author: Joseph Brodsky | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subject: Politics & Public Policy

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. – Maria Popova

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We suffer primarily because we are so insentient to our own emotions, so illiterate in reading ourselves. – Maria Popova

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The main difficulty that faces … [ Read more ]

Authors: John Macmurray, Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Concepts, Education | Scholarship, Excerpts, Intelligence | Knowledge, Personal Improvement, Senses, Thought | Inquiry

“My experience is what I agree to attend to.” – William James

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“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 … [ Read more ]

Authors: Andy Clark, Maria Popova, William James | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Excerpts, Insight, Psychology | Behavior, Senses, Thought | Inquiry

Even after one has experienced love, one finds difficulty defining it. Likewise, one may define it and then have all kinds of trouble experiencing it, because, once having defined it, one is in too pompous a frame of mind ever again to submit to its sweet illusion. By and large, love is easier to experience before it has been explained — easier and cleaner. The … [ Read more ]

Author: E.B. White | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Concepts, Love

The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.

Author: Mary Oliver | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Concepts, Creativity and Innovation, Life & Society, Personal Improvement

All of us, to some extent, borrow from others, from the culture around us. Ideas are in the air, and we may appropriate, often without realizing, the phrases and language of the times. We borrow language itself; we did not invent it. We found it, we grew up into it, though we may use it, interpret it, in very individual ways. What is at issue … [ Read more ]

Author: Oliver Sacks | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Concepts, Creativity and Innovation, Life & Society, Personal Improvement

Creativity involves not only years of conscious preparation and training but unconscious preparation as well. This incubation period is essential to allow the subconscious assimilation and incorporation of one’s influences and sources, to reorganize and synthesize them into something of one’s own…. The essential element in these realms of retaining and appropriating versus assimilating and incorporating is one of depth, of meaning, of active and … [ Read more ]

Author: Oliver Sacks | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Concepts, Creativity and Innovation

For centuries, our culture conditioned us to “see the problem of love primarily as that of being loved, rather than that of loving,” which in turn conditioned us to believe that the hardest thing about love is finding the right person to love us, but once we do, love is easy. [Erich] Fromm inverted this equation. […] he observed that the key to love is … [ Read more ]

Authors: Erich Fromm, Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Concepts, Love

The price that man pays for consciousness is insecurity. He can stand his insecurity by being aware and accepting the human condition, and by the hope that he will not fail even though he has no guarantee for success.

Author: Erich Fromm | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Concepts, Hope, Insight, Life & Society, Psychology | Behavior

Hope — and the wise, effective action that can spring from it — is the counterweight to the heavy sense of our own fragility. It is a continual negotiation between optimism and despair, a continual negation of cynicism and naïveté. We hope precisely because we are aware that terrible outcomes are always possible and often probable, but that the choices we make can impact the … [ Read more ]

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

One might even say that moving minds — our own as well as those of others — is among the most effortful labor there is.

Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subject: Personal Improvement

I would not go so far as to claim that knowledge and wisdom are mutually exclusive; but they are far from being communicating vessels, and the level of one has no bearing on that of the other. More people have gained wisdom from unknowledge, which is not the same as ignorance, than from knowledge.

Author: Erwin Chargaff | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Intelligence | Knowledge, Wisdom

Our understanding of the world is built up of innumerable layers. Each layer is worth exploring, as long as we do not forget that it is one of many. Knowing all there is to be known about one layer — a most unlikely event — would not teach us much about the rest. The integration of the enormous number of bits of information and the … [ Read more ]

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

Memory, then, is not the pencil with which the outline of a life is drawn but the eraser — something as true of our personal memory as it is of our collective memory, which contains everything we know as culture.

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

The vast majority of life unfolds in the small, unremembered moments that furnish the microscopic threads in the tapestry of being.

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

The exercise of our memory does not bring us closer to the past but draws us farther away.

Author: Sally Mann | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Life & Society, Memory, Personal Improvement

Life is not what one lived, but what one remembers and how one remembers it in order to recount it.

Author: Gabriel García Márquez | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Experience, Insight, Life & Society, Memory, Personal Improvement

Part of the modern ideology of love is to assume that love and sex always go together. They can, I suppose, but I think rather to the detriment of either one or the other. And probably the greatest problem for human beings is that they just don’t.

Author: Susan Sontag | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Concepts, Love

To respond in a reactive culture, to marry firm moral conviction with a spirit of goodwill and the porousness necessary for appraising other perspectives in order to evolve one’s own, is a Herculean feat of character. And yet there are instances in which it is unsound to engage with another whose values are so antithetical to one’s own that the collision is bound to shatter … [ Read more ]

Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Communication, Personal Improvement, Relationships