To lose the appetite for meaning we call thinking and cease to ask unanswerable questions [would be to] lose not only the ability to produce those thought-things that we call works of art but also the capacity to ask all the answerable questions upon which every civilization is founded.
Author: Hannah Arendt | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Art, Concepts, Intelligence | Knowledge, Thought | Inquiry
When we surrender the grandest, often unanswerable questions to the false certitudes of the smallest, we lose something essential of our humanity. When we aim the spears of those certitudes at one another, more interested in being right than in understanding, we lose something essential.
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Concepts, Intelligence | Knowledge
Try as we might not to be blinded by society’s prescriptions for happiness, we are still social creatures porous to the values of our peers — creatures surprisingly and often maddeningly myopic about the things we believe furnish our completeness as human beings, habitually aspiring to the wrong things for the wrong reasons. – Maria Popova
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Happiness, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior
So I had finally come to the conclusion that my task was to become more and more aware, more and more understanding with an understanding that was not at all the same thing as intellectual comprehension. […] Without understanding, I was at the mercy of blind habit; with understanding, I could develop my own rules for living and find out which of the conflicting exhortations … [ Read more ]
Author: Marion Milner | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings)
I had just begun to ponder over the fact that all the things which I had found to be sources of happiness seemed to depend upon the capacity to relax all straining, to widen my attention beyond the circle of personal interest, and to look detachedly at my own experience. I had just realized that this relaxing and detachment must depend on a fundamental sense … [ Read more ]
Author: Marion Milner | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subject: Psychology | Behavior
People said: “Oh, be yourself at all costs.” But I had found that it was not so easy to know just what one’s self was. It was far easier to want what other people seemed to want and then imagine that the choice was one’s own.
Author: Marion Milner | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subject: Personal Improvement
If just looking could be so satisfying, why was I always striving to have things or to get things done? Certainly I had never suspected that the key to my private reality might lie in so apparently simple a skill as the ability to let the senses roam unfettered by purposes. I began to wonder whether eyes and ears might not have a wisdom of … [ Read more ]
Author: Marion Milner | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subject: Senses
For love that seeks aught but the disclosure of its own mystery is not love but a net cast forth: and only the unprofitable is caught.
Author: Kahlil Gibran | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Concepts, Love
The saccharine pleasure of self-righteousness is, upon even the most cursory reflection, incompatible with compassion — with the ability to consider another’s foibles and mistakes with the same generosity of interpretation, in the same breadth of context and character, one would consider one’s own.
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior, Tolerance
I have always been mystified by the speed with which people condemn one another […] This seems to give them intense pleasure. Whenever I am tempted by this pleasure, I remember some impulse in myself that could have led me, granted certain circumstances, into the condemned position. This has caused me to distrust the part of myself that would relish self-righteousness.
Author: Anne Truitt | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior, Tolerance
Solitude is the path over which destiny endeavors to lead man to himself. Solitude is the path that men most fear.
Author: Hermann Hesse | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior
All the good in a man, for which he is praised or loved, is merely good suffering, the right kind, the living kind of suffering, a suffering to the full. The ability to suffer well is more than half of life — indeed, it is all life.
Author: Hermann Hesse | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Concepts, Life & Society, Meaning, Pain & Suffering
Prejudice can be detected, discounted, and refined, but so long as finite men must compress into a short schooling preparation for dealing with a vast civilization, they must carry pictures of it around with them, and have prejudices. The quality of their thinking and doing will depend on whether those prejudices are friendly, friendly to other people, to other ideas, whether they evoke love of … [ Read more ]
Author: Walter Lippmann | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Life & Society, Prejudice and Stereotype, Psychology | Behavior
A pattern of stereotypes is not neutral. It is not merely a way of substituting order for the great blooming, buzzing confusion of reality. It is not merely a short cut. It is all these things and something more. It is the guarantee of our self-respect; it is the projection upon the world of our own sense of our own value, our own position and … [ Read more ]
Author: Walter Lippmann | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Prejudice and Stereotype, Psychology | Behavior
The systems of stereotypes may be the core of our personal tradition, the defenses of our position in society.
They are an ordered, more or less consistent picture of the world, to which our habits, our tastes, our capacities, our comforts and our hopes have adjusted themselves. They may not be a complete picture of the world, but they are a picture of a possible world … [ Read more ]
Author: Walter Lippmann | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Perception | Observation, Prejudice and Stereotype, Psychology | Behavior
The great tragedy of human society […] is that those in power are reluctant to hold stereotypes lightly and modify them gladly, because stereotypes are how they stake out their place in the world and maintain the world-order that is the source of their power.
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Life & Society, Power, Prejudice and Stereotype
We are told about the world before we see it. We imagine most things before we experience them. And those preconceptions, unless education has made us acutely aware, govern deeply the whole process of perception. They mark out certain objects as familiar or strange, emphasizing the difference, so that the slightly familiar is seen as very familiar, and the somewhat strange as sharply alien… Were … [ Read more ]
Author: Walter Lippmann | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Life & Society, Perception | Observation, Prejudice and Stereotype, Psychology | Behavior, Thought | Inquiry
Those whom we love and admire most are the men and women whose consciousness is peopled thickly with persons rather than with types, who know us rather than the classification into which we might fit. For even without phrasing it to ourselves, we feel intuitively that all classification is in relation to some purpose not necessarily our own; that between two human beings no association … [ Read more ]
Author: Walter Lippmann | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Prejudice and Stereotype, Relationships
For the most part we do not first see, and then define, we define first and then see. In the great blooming, buzzing confusion of the outer world we pick out what our culture has already defined for us, and we tend to perceive that which we have picked out in the form stereotyped for us by our culture.
Author: Walter Lippmann | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Culture, Life & Society, Prejudice and Stereotype, Thought | Inquiry
Each thing we preconceive blinds us to what actually is — a tendency that, when it rises to the level of social perception in the form of stereotypes, metastasizes into a status quo that makes the powerful all the more powerful and the power-poor all the poorer.
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Power, Psychology | Behavior, Thought | Inquiry