The Marginalian
The Marginalian

Reads tagged with “diaries”

Nobel Laureate André Gide on What It Really Means to Be Original and Goethe’s Paradoxical Model of Creativity
Nobel Laureate André Gide on What It Really Means to Be Original and Goethe’s Paradoxical Model of Creativity

“If one does not absorb everything, one loses oneself completely. The mind must be greater than the world and contain it…”

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Emerson on What Beauty Really Means, How to Cultivate Its True Hallmarks, and Why It Bewitches the Human Imagination
Emerson on What Beauty Really Means, How to Cultivate Its True Hallmarks, and Why It Bewitches the Human Imagination

“The secret of ugliness consists not in irregularity, but in being uninteresting.”

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The Value of a Compassionate Lie
The Value of a Compassionate Lie

A poignant reminder that a life of nuance in a black-and-white culture is the greatest art of all.

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Simone Weil on How to Make Use of Your Suffering
Simone Weil on How to Make Use of Your Suffering

“To make use … of the sufferings that chance inflicts upon us is better than inflicting discipline upon oneself.”

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Virginia Woolf on the Elasticity of Time
Virginia Woolf on the Elasticity of Time

“An hour, once it lodges in the queer element of the human spirit, may be stretched to fifty or a hundred times its clock length.”

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How a Dream Came True: Young Jane Goodall’s Exuberant Letters and Diary Entries from Africa
How a Dream Came True: Young Jane Goodall’s Exuberant Letters and Diary Entries from Africa

How the beloved scientist transformed a childhood fantasy into the rugged reality of revolutionary work.

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Teenage Sylvia Plath’s Letters to Her Mother on the Joy of Living and Writing as Salvation and Sustenance for the Spirit
Teenage Sylvia Plath’s Letters to Her Mother on the Joy of Living and Writing as Salvation and Sustenance for the Spirit

“I want to be affected by life deeply, but never so blinded that I cannot see my share of existence in a wry, humorous light…”

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From Dream to Nightmare: John Steinbeck on the Perils of Publicity and the Dark Side of Success
From Dream to Nightmare: John Steinbeck on the Perils of Publicity and the Dark Side of Success

“It is so hard to know anything. So impossible to trust oneself. Even to know what there is to trust.”

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Kierkegaard on Popular Opinion, the Petty Jealousies of Criticism, and the Only Cure for Embitterment in Creative Work
Kierkegaard on Popular Opinion, the Petty Jealousies of Criticism, and the Only Cure for Embitterment in Creative Work

“I need the enchantment of creative work to help me forget life’s mean pettinesses.”

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Thoreau on the Sacredness of Libraries and His Ideal Sanctuary for Books
Thoreau on the Sacredness of Libraries and His Ideal Sanctuary for Books

“Those old books suggested a certain fertility … as if they were making a humus for new literatures to spring in.”

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