Wide differences of opinion in matters of religious, political, and social belief must exist if conscience and intellect alike are not be stunted, if there is to be room for healthy growth.
Author: Theodore Roosevelt | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Personal Improvement, Politics & Public Policy
To judge a man merely by success is an abhorrent wrong; and if the people at large habitually so judge men, if they grow to condone wickedness because the wicked man triumphs, they show their inability to understand that in the last analysis free institutions rest upon the character of citizenship, and that by such admiration of evil they prove themselves unfit for liberty.
Author: Theodore Roosevelt | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Concepts, Ethics | Integrity | Morality, Life & Society, Politics & Public Policy, Psychology | Behavior
We have increasingly shifted our definitions of success from the immaterial to the material, from the interior to the exterior, from the private to the public. And in that shift, we have incurred a peculiar and perilous blindness to the moral and humanistic dimensions of success — to how being a good human being and a good member of a community, of a society, of … [ Read more ]
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Life & Society, Material Possessions, Personal Improvement, Success / Failure
Reformers are apt to forget, in their reasoning, that the world is not made up entirely of the wicked and the hungry, there are persons hungry for the food of the mind, the wants of which are as imperious as those of the body […] Reformers are apt to forget too, that the social chain is indomitable; that link by link it acts together, you … [ Read more ]
Author: Maria Mitchell | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Life & Society, Politics & Public Policy
It takes courage, of course, to step out of the fray, as it takes courage to do anything that’s necessary, whether tending to a loved one on her deathbed or turning away from that sugarcoated doughnut.
Author: Pico Iyer | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subject: Personal Improvement
It’s only by taking myself away from clutter and distraction that I can begin to hear something out of earshot and recall that listening is much more invigorating than giving voice to all the thoughts and prejudices that anyway keep me company twenty-four hours a day. And it’s only by going nowhere — by sitting still or letting my mind relax — that I find … [ Read more ]
Author: Pico Iyer | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Personal Improvement, Productivity & Time Management, Thought | Inquiry
Not many years ago, it was access to information and movement that seemed our greatest luxury; nowadays it’s often freedom from information, the chance to sit still, that feels like the ultimate prize. Stillness is not just an indulgence for those with enough resources — it’s a necessity for anyone who wishes to gather less visible resources. Going nowhere […] is not about austerity so … [ Read more ]
Author: Pico Iyer | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Concepts, Information, Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Senses
Over and over, people would overestimate the degree of control they had over events — smart people, people who excelled at many things, people who should have known better… The more they overestimated their own skill relative to luck, the less they learned from what the environment was trying to tell them, and the worse their decisions became… The illusion of control is what prevented … [ Read more ]
Authors: Maria Konnikova, Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) (December 8, 2020) | Subjects: Excerpts, Life & Society, Math & Science, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior
The unhappy person is one who has his ideal, the content of his life, the fullness of his consciousness, the essence of his being, in some manner outside of himself. The unhappy man is always absent from himself, never present to himself. But one can be absent, obviously, either in the past or in the future. This adequately circumscribes the entire territory of the unhappy … [ Read more ]
Author: Søren Kierkegaard | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Happiness, Psychology | Behavior
Death is a meaningful part of life, just like human suffering. Both do not rob the existence of human beings of meaning but make it meaningful in the first place. Thus, it is precisely the uniqueness of our existence in the world, the irretrievability of our lifetime, the irrevocability of everything with which we fill it — or leave unfulfilled — that gives our existence … [ Read more ]
Author: Viktor Frankl | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Concepts, Meaning, Personal Improvement
Happiness should not, must not, and can never be a goal, but only an outcome; the outcome of the fulfillment of that which in Tagore’s poem is called duty. […] All human striving for happiness, in this sense, is doomed to failure as luck can only fall into one’s lap but can never be hunted down.
Author: Viktor Frankl | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Happiness, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior
The golden age of consumerism […] has built a global economy by continually robbing us of the sense of meaning and selling it back to us at the price of the product.
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Economics | Economy, Life & Society
Our collective memory always tends toward amnesia and erasure — especially of periods scarred by civilizational shame.
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: History, Life & Society
A person who does not know that silent intercourse (in which we examine what we say and what we do) will not mind contradicting himself, and this means he will never be either able or willing to account for what he says or does; nor will he mind committing any crime, since he can count on its being forgotten the next moment.
Author: Hannah Arendt | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior, Thought | Inquiry
We deceive ourselves about love — about who; and how; and when; and whether. We also discover and correct our self-deceptions. The forces making for both deception and unmasking here are various and powerful: the unsurpassed danger, the urgent need for protection and self-sufficiency, the opposite and equal need for joy and communication and connection. Any of these can serve either truth or falsity, as … [ Read more ]
Author: Martha Nussbaum | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Concepts, Love
Nowhere is our capacity for enchantment, nor our capacity for self-deception, greater than in love — the region of human experience where the path to truth is most obstructed by the bramble of rationalization and where we are most likely to be kidnapped by our own delicious delusions. There, it is perennially difficult to know what we really want; difficult to distinguish between love and … [ Read more ]
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Concepts, Love
Our human foibles don’t negate our goodness or our desire for betterment but, rather, provide both the fuel for it and the yardstick by which we measure our moral progress.
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior
This is how the world changes: We loosen the stranglehold of our givens, bend and stretch our minds to imagine what was once unimaginable, test our theories against reality, and emerge with vision expanded into new dimensions of truth.
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Change, Concepts, Personal Improvement
Our addiction to untruths and mythologies spells the death of our ideals, and ideals are the material of the human spirit.
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Concepts, Intelligence | Knowledge, Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior
There is nothing which is so weak for working purposes as this enormous importance attached to immediate victory. There is nothing that fails like success.
Author: G. K. Chesterton | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Personal Improvement, Success / Failure