The Marginalian
The Marginalian

Reads tagged with “letters”

Seneca on Gratitude and What It Really Means to Be a Generous Human Being
Seneca on Gratitude and What It Really Means to Be a Generous Human Being

“I am grateful, not in order that my neighbour, provoked by the earlier act of kindness, may be more ready to benefit me, but simply in order that I may perform a most pleasant and beautiful act.”

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Rilke on the Lonely Patience of Creative Work
Rilke on the Lonely Patience of Creative Work

“Works of art are of an infinite loneliness and with nothing so little to be reached as with criticism. Only love can grasp and hold and be just toward them.”

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Thomas Carlyle on What Self-Help Really Means and the Healing Power of Love in Moments of Blackest Despair
Thomas Carlyle on What Self-Help Really Means and the Healing Power of Love in Moments of Blackest Despair

“The feeling of recklessness and stormy self-help, when friends grow cold, and the world seems to cast us off, and the heart gathers force from its own wretchedness, converting its ‘tortures into horrid arms.’ There is strength here and dignity…”

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How a Hungarian Teenager Revolutionized Mathematics and Equipped Einstein with the Building Blocks of Relativity
How a Hungarian Teenager Revolutionized Mathematics and Equipped Einstein with the Building Blocks of Relativity

“I have created a new universe from nothing.”

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Werner Heisenberg Falls in Love: The Love Letters of the Nobel-Winning Pioneer of Quantum Mechanics and Originator of the Uncertainty Principle
Werner Heisenberg Falls in Love: The Love Letters of the Nobel-Winning Pioneer of Quantum Mechanics and Originator of the Uncertainty Principle

“Life’s essence should always be clearly noticeable behind the love, or the music, or the work.”

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A Flash of Illumination on the Greyhound Bus: Physicist Freeman Dyson on Creative Breakthrough and the Unconscious Mind
A Flash of Illumination on the Greyhound Bus: Physicist Freeman Dyson on Creative Breakthrough and the Unconscious Mind

“It is strange the way ideas come when they are needed.”

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Egon Schiele on What It Means to Be an Artist and Why Visionaries Always Come from the Minority
Egon Schiele on What It Means to Be an Artist and Why Visionaries Always Come from the Minority

“Envy those who see beauty in everything in the world.”

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The Art of Sympathetic Enthusiasm: Goethe on the Only Opinion Worth Voicing About Another’s Life and Creative Labor
The Art of Sympathetic Enthusiasm: Goethe on the Only Opinion Worth Voicing About Another’s Life and Creative Labor

In praise of the “loving sympathy” that makes life worthy of living.

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Elizabeth Barrett Browning on Happiness as a Moral Obligation
Elizabeth Barrett Browning on Happiness as a Moral Obligation

“It is well to fly towards the light, even where there may be some fluttering and bruising of wings against the windowpanes, is it not?”

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T.S. Eliot on Writing: His Warm and Wry Letter of Advice to a Sixteen-Year-Old Girl Aspiring to Become a Writer
T.S. Eliot on Writing: His Warm and Wry Letter of Advice to a Sixteen-Year-Old Girl Aspiring to Become a Writer

“Don’t write at first for anyone but yourself.”

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