The task of education, John Dewey asserted […] is not “to teach every possible item of information [but] to cultivate deep-seated and effective habits of discriminating tested beliefs from mere assertions, guesses, and opinions.”
Authors: John Dewey, Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subject: Education | Scholarship
Where pride walks nothing of life remains. It is the supreme destroyer of life. Pride leaves nothing in its path. It is death in life.
Author: Agnes Martin | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement
Living by inspiration is living. Living by intellect — by comparisons, calculations, schemes, concepts, ideas — is all a structure of pride in which there is not beauty or happiness — no life.
Author: Agnes Martin | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Insight, Life & Society, Personal Improvement
The measure of your life is the amount of beauty and happiness of which you are aware.
Author: Agnes Martin | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Insight, Life & Society, Personal Improvement
Happiness is pervasive. It is everywhere… When we are unhappy it is because something is covering our minds and we are not able to be aware of happiness. When the difficulty is past we find happiness again. It is not that happiness is all around us. That is not it at all. It is not this or that or in this or that. It is … [ Read more ]
Author: Agnes Martin | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Happiness, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior
Happiness defies the usual laws of effort and achievement: The more ferociously we try to attain it, the more it eludes us.
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Happiness, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior
…for where truth is absolute — a binary correspondence with reality: a premise either reflects reality or does not — meaning can be relative; it is shaped by one’s subjective interpretation, which is contingent upon beliefs and can be manipulated. Certainty lives in the realm of meaning, not of truth. […] All propaganda is in the business of manipulating certainty, but it can never manipulate … [ Read more ]
Authors: Hannah Arendt, Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Concepts, Education | Scholarship, Ethics | Integrity | Morality, Insight, Life & Society, Thought | Inquiry
What a man most needs is not a knowledge of how to get more, but a knowledge of the most he can do without, and of how to get along without it. The essential cultural discrimination is not between having and not having or haves and have-nots, but between the superfluous and the indispensable. Wisdom, it seems to me, is always poised upon the knowledge … [ Read more ]
Author: Wendell Berry | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Life & Society, Material Possessions, Personal Improvement
One of the things the story teaches us is this: Read yourself as a fiction as well as a fact. […] Learning to read yourself as a fiction as well as a fact is liberating — it is the difference between energy and mass.
Author: Jeanette Winterson | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Personal Improvement
Reading is an adventure. Adventures are about the unknown. When I started to read seriously I was excited and comforted all at the same time. Literature is a mix of unfamiliarity and recognition. The situation can take us anywhere — across time and space, the globe, through the lives of people who can never be like us — into the heart of anguish we have … [ Read more ]
Author: Jeanette Winterson | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Literature | Arts, Reading | Writing
Write what you know is reasonable advice. Read what you don’t know is better advice.
Author: Jeanette Winterson | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Literature | Arts, Reading | Writing
We read for countless reasons and books transform us in countless ways, reckoned and unreckoned. We read the way we love — with our whole selves, with the flickering constellation of values, longings, traumas, joys, hopes, despairs, formative experiences, and half-remembered impressions composing the self. We read with our whole being, but we also read ourselves into being as each book quietly reconfigures the constellation … [ Read more ]
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Literature | Arts, Reading | Writing
There are few catastrophes, in our own lives or in those of nations, that do not ultimately have their origins in emotional ignorance.
Author: Alain de Botton | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Insight, Life & Society
The emotionally intelligent person knows that love is a skill, not a feeling, and will require trust, vulnerability, generosity, humor, sexual understanding, and selective resignation.
Author: Alain de Botton | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Concepts, Love
We are as clever with our machines and technologies as we are simple-minded in the management of our emotions. We are, in terms of wisdom, little more advanced than the ancient Sumerians or the Picts. We have the technology of an advanced civilization balancing precariously on an emotional base that has not developed much since we dwelt in caves. We have the appetites and destructive … [ Read more ]
Author: Alain de Botton | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Intelligence | Knowledge, Life & Society, Wisdom
The knack of our species lies in our capacity to transmit our accumulated knowledge down the generations. The slowest among us can, in a few hours, pick up ideas that it took a few rare geniuses a lifetime to acquire.
Yet what is distinctive is just how selective we are about the topics we deem it possible to educate ourselves in. Our energies are overwhelmingly directed … [ Read more ]
Author: Alain de Botton | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Life & Society, Personal Improvement
We have ingrained tendencies to shut our ears to all the major truths about our deeper selves. Our settled impulse is to blame anyone who lays our blind spots and insufficiencies bare, unless our defenses have first been adroitly and seductively appeased. In the face of critically important insights, we get distracted, proud, or fidgety. We may prefer to do almost anything other than take … [ Read more ]
Author: Alain de Botton | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior
We cherish things, Japan has always known, precisely because they cannot last; it’s their frailty that adds sweetness to their beauty.
Author: Pico Iyer | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Insight, Life & Society, Perception | Observation
The impermanence of things — of seasons and lifetimes and galaxies and loves — is what confers preciousness and sweetness upon them.
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Insight, Life & Society, Perception | Observation
Millennia of evolution have hardly allayed our preference for anecdote over probability — a failure to internalize mathematical rules known in psychology as the description‐experience gap, leading to what the Nobel-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman has memorably described as our tendency to draw our confidence in our beliefs not from the quality of the evidence but from the coherence of the story we have constructed. Numberless … [ Read more ]
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior