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

A positive engagement to marry a certain person at a certain time, at all haps and hazards, I have always considered the most ridiculous thing on earth: it is either altogether useless or altogether miserable; if the parties continue faithfully attached to each other it is a mere ceremony — if otherwise it comes a galling fetter riveting them to wretchedness and only to be … [ Read more ]

Author: Jane Welsh Carlyle | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Love, Psychology | Behavior, Relationships

We always need to cast a critical look at where we presently are, attempting always to discern where we have become stagnant and where new beginning might be ripening. There can be no growth if we do not remain open and vulnerable to what is new and different. I have never seen anyone take a risk for growth that was not rewarded a thousand times … [ Read more ]

Author: John O’Donohue | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subject: Personal Improvement

No territory of life exposes both our power and our vulnerability more brightly than a beginning.

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

Purpose and meaning are not inherent to the universe but our own creation… all of our reckonings with the nature of reality are a mirror we hold up to ourselves.

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

Inseparable from the question of freedom is the nature of the imagination — that ultimate frontier of our freedom of thought.

Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Concepts, Creativity and Innovation, Freedom | Liberty

As we steer a course through the river of our lives, we are affected by innumerable forces, the vast majority unknown to us. By some accounts this makes of our freedom an illusion, for how can we purport to freely choose when we can’t even see a fraction of the legion of influences acting on us, limiting our movements, sparking our appetites? The threat this … [ Read more ]

Author: William Egginton | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement

To love without knowing how to love wounds the person we love.

Author: Thich Nhat Hanh | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Love, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior, Relationships

Nothing does more damage in love than a paucity of self-knowledge.

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

We live in a culture that idealizes the idea of love, and the idea that there is one true person who will complete you, fulfill all your dreams and love you forever. We are told from an early age that our true love is out there, waiting for us and so we yearn to find them, to know what it feels like to experience true … [ Read more ]

Author: Roxane Gay | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Love, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior, Relationships

We mistake much for love – admiration, attraction, need. We fumble and fall again and again into the treacherous abyss between the idea of love – an idea baggaged with millennia of cultural mythologies – and the reality of love, with all its work and responsibility.

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

When you love someone you do not love them all the time, in exactly the same way, from moment to moment. It is an impossibility. It is even a lie to pretend to. And yet this is exactly what most of us demand. We have so little faith in the ebb and flow of life, of love, of relationships. We leap at the flow of … [ Read more ]

Author: Anne Morrow Lindbergh | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Love, Psychology | Behavior, Relationships

The twin root of our suffering in a changing relationship is the expectation — the demand, even — that the other’s love be total and permanent, reserved for us alone, unshared with other priorities and passions, those natural constituents of a fully developed personality and a fully inhabited life.

Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Love, Psychology | Behavior

The ego, the false self, [is] the root of all the evil that enters the earth and destroys human life, and with it, of course, the reality of time, the reality of lived presence. The ego lives only in the future and the past; it has no present moment; it is always hurrying or dreaming.

Author: Jacob Needleman | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior

A problem is a judgment and all judgment is a straitjacket of understanding; a question is an invitation to wonder, which is the antipode of judgment.

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

Two millennia after Seneca devised his cautionary taxonomy of time saved, spent, and wasted, we have invented innumerable tools and technologies to save time but find ourselves wasting it more helplessly than ever.

Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Personal Improvement, Productivity & Time Management

[Time] is the elementary particle of presence and the fundamental unit of attention — the two most precious resources we have, out of which every meaningful experiences is welded. To give a practice your time is an act of devotion. To give a person your time is a supreme act of love.

Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Productivity & Time Management

People are generally better persuaded by the reasons which they have themselves discovered than by those which have come into the mind of others.

Author: Blaise Pascal | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Communication, Education | Scholarship, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior

When we wish to correct with advantage, and to show another that he errs, we must notice from what side he views the matter, for on that side it is usually true, and admit that truth to him, but reveal to him the side on which it is false. He is satisfied with that, for he sees that he was not mistaken, and that he … [ Read more ]

Author: Blaise Pascal | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Communication, Education | Scholarship, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior

The process of gathering knowledge does not lead to knowing. A child’s world spreads only a little beyond his understanding while that of a great scientist thrusts outward immeasurably. An answer is invariably the parent of a great family of new questions. So we draw worlds and fit them like tracings against the world about us, and crumple them when they do not fit and … [ Read more ]

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

In our longing for certainty we keep propping ourselves up from the elemental wobbliness of life on the crutch of opinion. Few things are more seductive to us than a ready opinion, and we brandish few things more flagrantly as we move through the world, slicing through its fundamental uncertainty with our insecure certitudes.

Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior