Avoidance is one of the commonest ways of hedging against our fear of rejection and hurt — a coping mechanism for disappointment that we developed when the people first tasked with caring for us let us down.
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Psychology | Behavior, Relationships
Instead of requesting reassurance endearingly and laying out our longing with charm, we have tendencies to mask our needs beneath some tricky behaviors guaranteed to frustrate our ultimate aims.
Author: Alain de Botton | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Psychology | Behavior, Relationships
Living alone can be deeply rewarding and deeply challenging. It is not for everyone. It is not for those who romanticize its offerings of freedom and focus, but excise its menacing visitations of loneliness and alienation. It is not for those who find silence shattering. It is especially not for those who hunger for another consciousness to validate their experience and redeem their reality. It … [ Read more ]
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subject: Life & Society
When you love, truly love somebody, there is no version of reality in which what is good for them is bad for you, no choice they could possibly make that is right for them and wrong for you, nothing they could give you that could make love more complete.
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Concepts, Love, Relationships
The self, the place where we live, is a place of illusion.
Author: Iris Murdoch | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Life & Society, Psychology | Behavior
What we choose and how we choose it defines the measure of our sanity, and how we go about choosing our adaptive delusions over the maladaptive ones defines our fitness for life.
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior
We are touchingly prone to mistaking our models of reality for reality itself, mistaking the strength of our certainty for the strength of the evidence, thus moving through a dream of our own making that we call life.
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Life & Society, Thought | Inquiry
We spend our lives trying to anchor our transience in some illusion of permanence and stability. We lay plans, we make vows, we backbone the flow of uncertainty with habits and routines that lull us with the comforting dream of predictability and control, only to find ourselves again and again bent at the knees with surrender to forces and events vastly larger than us. In … [ Read more ]
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Life & Society, Psychology | Behavior
Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.
Author: Albert Einstein | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Concepts, Creativity and Innovation, Education | Scholarship, Intelligence | Knowledge
I am a determinist. As such, I do not believe in free will… I believe with Schopenhauer: We can do what we wish, but we can only wish what we must. Practically, I am, nevertheless, compelled to act is if freedom of the will existed. If I wish to live in a civilized community, I must act as if man is a responsible being.
Author: Albert Einstein | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Concepts, Freedom | Liberty, Life & Society, Philosophy
The sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, psychic, or intellectual, forms a bridge between the sharers which can be the basis for understanding much of what is not shared between them, and lessens the threat of their difference.
Author: Audre Lorde | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Life & Society, Relationships
Whenever you think or you believe or you know, you’re a lot of other people: but the moment you feel, you’re nobody-but-yourself.
Author: E.E. Cummings | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Life & Society, Psychology | Behavior
Love every leaf… Love the animals, love the plants, love everything. If you love everything, you will perceive the divine mystery in things. Once you have perceived it, you will begin to comprehend it better every day, and you will come at last to love the world with an all-embracing love.
Author: Fyodor Dostoyevsky | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Concepts, Environment | Sustainability, Love, Nature, Personal Improvement
Our senses, like our neighbors, hate what they do not understand.
Author: Kahlil Gibran | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Concepts, Senses
In my youth I longed for the unknown, and for the unknown I am still longing. But in the days of my youth longing embraced necessity that knows naught of patience. Today I long not less, but my longing is friendly with patience, and even waiting.
Author: Kahlil Gibran | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement
We are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not.
Author: Joan Didion | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subject: Personal Improvement
The selves we have been — young and foolish, hungry for the wrong things, hopeful for the right but winged by hope into hubris — are elemental building blocks of who we become, unsheddable like the hydrogen and helium that made the universe.
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Experience, Life & Society
It is a strange and uncanny result of urban civilization and the impact of technology on human experience that leisure has become a pursuit and an end in itself. It has gradually become an industry, a profession and an imperative social need of the individuals in modern societies. Everyone strives for more and more leisure and knows less and less what to do with it. … [ Read more ]
Author: Masud Khan | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Life & Society, Psychology | Behavior
Bertrand Russell called it “fruitful monotony.” Adam Phillips called it “fertile solitude.” Walt Whitman called it “loafing.” The Buddhist tradition describes it simply as presence. Whatever we may call it, amid a culture of filling the existential void with cultish productivity and an endless stream of dopamine-laced distractions, it is nothing less than a countercultural act of courage and resistance to enact such states of … [ Read more ]
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Productivity & Time Management
Mistakes are at the very base of human thought, embedded there, feeding the structure like root nodules. If we were not provided with the knack of being wrong, we could never get anything useful done. We think our way along by choosing between right and wrong alternatives, and the wrong choices have to be made as frequently as the right ones. We get along in … [ Read more ]
Author: Lewis Thomas | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Experience, Learning, Life & Society