The discipline of countering our reflex for self-righteousness is a triumph of existential maturity — one increasingly rare in a culture where most people would rather armor themselves with judgment than tremble with uncertainty, would rather be right than understand.
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Communication, Education | Scholarship, Life & Society, Politics & Public Policy, Psychology | Behavior
It is only in these bonds that our individuality has a use and a worth; it is only to the people who know us, love us, and depend on us that we are indispensable as the persons we uniquely are… Separate from the relationships, there is nobody to be known.
Author: Wendell Berry | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Individuality, Psychology | Behavior, Relationships
The problem, of course, is that we are not the authors of ourselves. That we are not is a religious perception, but it is also a biological and a social one. Each of us has had many authors, and each of us is engaged, for better or worse, in that same authorship. We could say that the human race is a great coauthorship in which … [ Read more ]
Author: Wendell Berry | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Concepts, Individuality, Life & Society, Meaning, Psychology | Behavior
Fundamental questions about the human condition are not beside the point in dire political times; they are the point. How can we think straight amidst cynicism and mendacity? What is there left to love, to cherish, to fight for? How can we act to best secure it? What fences and bridges do we need to build to protect freedom and which walls do we need … [ Read more ]
Author: Lyndsey Stonebridge | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subject: Politics & Public Policy
Desiring something is, without doubt, a move toward possession of that something (“possession” meaning that in some way or other the object should enter our orbit and become part of us). For this reason, desire automatically dies when it is fulfilled; it ends with satisfaction… One may sometimes grow to love what he desires: we desire what we love, because we love it.
Author: José Ortega y Gasset | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Desires, Love, Psychology | Behavior
Desire is often so difficult to distinguish from love because it is rooted in longing, but longing exists only in absence and evaporates at the moment of attainment, while love grows more saturated the more presence and energy it is given.
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Desires, Love, Psychology | Behavior
Love, strictly speaking, is pure sentimental activity toward an object, which can be anything — person or thing. As a “sentimental” activity, it remains, on the one hand, separated from all intellectual functions — perception, consideration, thought, recall, imagination — and, on the other hand, from desire, with which it is often confused. A glass of water is desired, but is not loved, when one … [ Read more ]
Author: José Ortega y Gasset | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Love, Psychology | Behavior
All love passes through the frantic zone of “falling in love”; but, on the other hand, “falling in love” is not always followed by genuine love. Let us, therefore, not confuse the part with the whole.
Author: José Ortega y Gasset | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Love, Psychology | Behavior, Relationships
Loving something is not simply “being,” but acting toward that which is loved… Love itself is, by nature, a transitive act in which we exert ourselves on behalf of what we love.
Author: José Ortega y Gasset | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Love, Psychology | Behavior, Relationships
It would be outlandish to conclude that, after being consistently wrong in our dealings with reality, we should hit the mark in love alone. The projection of imaginary qualities upon a real object is a constant phenomenon… To see things — moreover, to appreciate them! — always means to complete them… Strictly speaking, no one sees things in their naked reality.
Author: José Ortega y Gasset | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Love, Psychology | Behavior, Relationships
It is a strange thing, desire — so fiery yet so forlorn, aimed at having and animated by lack. In its restlessness and its pointedness, so single of focus, it shares psychic territory with addiction. Its Latin root — dē + sidus, “away from one’s star” — bespeaks its disorientation, its rush of longing, which we so easily mistake for love. And yet, when unplugged … [ Read more ]
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Desires, Love, Psychology | Behavior, Relationships
The self-limitation of control is the cage of howling loneliness that keeps us from the freedom necessary for love… That mysterious aspect of love — unreachable by logic and reason, impervious to will and control — is why our choice in love is largely an illusion, why our slender margin of choice contains only the courage and patience with which we face its trembling uncertainty … [ Read more ]
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Love, Psychology | Behavior
Feeling is what gives valence and meaning to experience.
Author: William James | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Experience, Life & Society, Psychology | Behavior
You come to understand that most people are neither for you nor against you, they are thinking about themselves. You learn that no matter how hard you try to please, some people in this world are not going to love you, a lesson that is at first troubling and then really quite relaxing.
Author: John W. Gardner | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior, Relationships
We build our own prisons and serve as our own jailkeepers… but clearly our parents and the society at large have a hand in building our prisons. They create roles for us — and self-images — that hold us captive for a long time. The individual intent on self-renewal will have to deal with ghosts of the past — the memory of earlier failures, the … [ Read more ]
Author: John W. Gardner | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Experience, Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior
Our Merger Self… is the universal wish to be attached to another, to restore somehow the beatific closeness with mother, for in that fusion would lie perfect harmony, absolute safety, and endless time. The Merger Self is born of the frustration with our early discovery that we are indeed separate and distinct from our caregiver. It triggers a desire to totally incorporate the other, any … [ Read more ]
Author: Gail Sheehy | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subject: Psychology | Behavior
When one has let go of the projections and the great hidden agenda, then one can be enlarged by the otherness of the partner. One plus one does not equal One, as in the fusion model; it equals three — the two as separate beings whose relationship forms a third which obliges them to stretch beyond their individual limitations. Moreover, by relinquishing projections and placing … [ Read more ]
Author: James Hollis | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior, Relationships
How we are related to ourselves determines not only the choice of the Other but the quality of the relationship… All relationships… are symptomatic of the state of our inner life, and no relationship can be any better than our relationship to our own unconscious.
Author: James Hollis | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior, Relationships
What is so often mistaken for love of another is a projection of the unloved parts of oneself.
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Concepts, Love, Relationships
Without some relationship to the cosmic drama, we are constrained to lives of transience, superficiality and aridity. Since the culture most of us have inherited offers little mythic mediation for the placement of self in a larger context, it is all the more imperative that the individual enlarge his or her vision.
Author: James Hollis | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Life & Society, Personal Improvement