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

Loving anybody and being loved by anybody is a tremendous danger, a tremendous responsibility.

Author: James Baldwin | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Life & Society, Love, Psychology | Behavior, Relationships

Being very rich so far as I am concerned is having a margin. The margin is being able to give.

Author: May Sarton | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Material Possessions, Personal Improvement

The seeker after the truth… is not he who studies the writings of the ancients and… puts his trust in them, but rather the one who suspects his faith in them and questions what he gathers from them, the one who submits to argument and demonstration, and not to the sayings of a human being whose nature is fraught with all kinds of imperfection and … [ Read more ]

Author: Ḥasan Ibn al-Haytham | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Math & Science, Personal Improvement, Thought | Inquiry

To live on a day-to-day basis is insufficient for human beings; we need to transcend, transport, escape; we need meaning, understanding, and explanation; we need to see overall patterns in our lives. We need hope, the sense of a future. And we need freedom (or at least the illusion of freedom) to get beyond ourselves, whether with telescopes and microscopes and our ever-burgeoning technology or … [ Read more ]

Author: Oliver Sacks | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Life & Society, Psychology | Behavior

A healthy mind knows how to hope; it identifies and then hangs on tenaciously to a few reasons to keep going. Grounds for despair, anger, and sadness are, of course, all around. But the healthy mind knows how to bracket negativity in the name of endurance. It clings to evidence of what is still good and kind. It remembers to appreciate… It refuses to let … [ Read more ]

Author: Alain de Botton | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Thought | Inquiry

A well-functioning mind recognizes the futility and cruelty of constantly finding fault with its own nature… [It] can quieten its own buzzing preoccupations in order, at times, to focus on the world beyond itself.

Author: Alain de Botton | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Personal Improvement, Thought | Inquiry

A mind in a healthy state is, in the background, continually performing a near-miraculous set of maneuvers that underpin our moods of clear-sightedness and purpose… A healthy mind is an editing mind, an organ that manages to sieve, from thousands of stray, dramatic, disconcerting, or horrifying thoughts, those particular ideas and sensations that actively need to be entertained in order for us to direct our … [ Read more ]

Author: Alain de Botton | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Thought | Inquiry

Attention is an intentional, unapologetic discriminator [that] asks what is relevant right now, and gears us up to notice only that.

Author: Alexandra Horowitz | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Thought | Inquiry

Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances.

Author: Viktor Frankl | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Attitude, Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior

There is deep consolation in the knowledge that the cherished friend will always return, long though the stretches of absence may be; there is singular solace in the understanding that leaving need not be abandonment, that time and space avail not in any true bond, which nothing but indifference can break.

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

Meeting and separation are two forms of friendship that contain the same good. Let us love this distance which is wholly woven of friendship, for those who do not love each other are not separated.

Author: Simone Weil | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Life & Society, Psychology | Behavior, Relationships

The ultimate touchstone of friendship is not improvement, neither of the other nor of the self, the ultimate touchstone is witness, the privilege of having been seen by someone and the equal privilege of being granted the sight of the essence of another, to have walked with them and to have believed in them, and sometimes just to have accompanied them for however brief a … [ Read more ]

Author: David Whyte | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Psychology | Behavior, Relationships

All creative work is at bottom a means of self-liberation and a coping mechanism — for the loneliness, the despair, the chaos and contradiction within. It is the best means we have of transmuting that which gnaws at us into something that nourishes, and yet how little of that private ferment is visible in the finished work.

Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Art, Concepts, Creativity and Innovation, Psychology | Behavior

[Albert] Schweitzer observed that there are two types of artists: the subjective, who use their personality as the wellspring of their art and live as “a law unto themselves,” and the objective, whose “artistic personality exists independently of the human” and whose art is “not impersonal, but superpersonal,” channeling the universal and the eternal through the vessel of their being.

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

Some inventions result from theorizing how something should work and then building it. Others result from building something that works before understanding it.

Author: George Dyson | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Concepts, Creativity and Innovation, Math & Science

We went on making equations and theories and bombs in an attempt to control life; we went on making poems and paintings and songs in an attempt to live with the fact that we cannot.

Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Art, Life & Society, Music, Psychology | Behavior

It seems clear that the more we exercise our sensitivity, the stronger it becomes… When it is not exercised, sensitivity tends to weaken… How important it must be, therefore, to exercise children’s sensitivity to the point where it will continue to develop as much as it is capable of — so that it can no longer be dulled by those things in life that tend … [ Read more ]

Author: Sophie de Grouchy | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Life & Society, Personal Improvement

Of all dangers to a nation… there can be no greater one than having certain portions of the people set off from the rest by a line drawn — they not privileged as others, but degraded, humiliated, made of no account.

Author: Walt Whitman | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: International, Politics & Public Policy

Many people just need someone to feel superior to make themselves feel better. You see Americans doing it now, unfortunately, while voting against their own interests. It is that kind of shortsighted behavior that is destroying us.

Author: Octavia Butler | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: America, International, Politics & Public Policy

To be led by a coward is to be controlled by all that the coward fears… To be led by a tyrant is to sell yourself and those you love into slavery.

Author: Octavia Butler | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subject: Politics & Public Policy