The Marginalian
The Marginalian

Reads tagged with “psychology”

How to Live with Death
How to Live with Death

Psychoanalyst Adam Phillips on how Darwin and Freud reframed our mortality as an organizing principle of human life.

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The Paradox of “Finding Yourself”
The Paradox of “Finding Yourself”

“The self is a style of being, continually expanding in a vital process of definition, affirmation, revision, and growth…”

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Alain de Botton on Infatuation
Alain de Botton on Infatuation

“The only people who can still strike us as normal are those we don’t yet know very well.”

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Elie Wiesel on the Loneliness of Leadership, How Our Questions Unite Us, and How Our Answers Divide Us
Elie Wiesel on the Loneliness of Leadership, How Our Questions Unite Us, and How Our Answers Divide Us

“Could it be that questions are the remedy for solitude? After all, we have learned from history that people are united by questions. It is the answers that divide them.”

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Neuroscientist Christof Koch on How the “Qualia” of Our Experience Illuminate the Central Mystery of Consciousness
Neuroscientist Christof Koch on How the “Qualia” of Our Experience Illuminate the Central Mystery of Consciousness

“Without consciousness there is nothing… Consciousness is the central fact of your life.”

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You Are Not the Target: Laura Huxley on Course-Correcting the Paths of Love and Not-Love
You Are Not the Target: Laura Huxley on Course-Correcting the Paths of Love and Not-Love

“In all its manifestations and however it is produced, not-love tends to beget not-love. The energy of love is needed to reconvert not-love into love.”

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Beethoven and the Crucial Difference Between Genius and Talent
Beethoven and the Crucial Difference Between Genius and Talent

“Genius has to be founded on major talent, but it adds a freshness and wildness of imagination, a raging ambition, an unusual gift for learning and growing, a depth and breadth of thought and spirit…”

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Freedom and Destiny: Rollo May on the Value of Despair as a Portal to Joy
Freedom and Destiny: Rollo May on the Value of Despair as a Portal to Joy

“Joy… follows rightly confronted despair. Joy is the experience of possibility, the consciousness of one’s freedom as one confronts one’s destiny… After despair, the one thing left is possibility.”

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Billy Collins’s Advice to Writers
Billy Collins’s Advice to Writers

“Spotlessness is the niece of inspiration.”

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Anna Deavere Smith on How to Break the Paradox of Procrastination
Anna Deavere Smith on How to Break the Paradox of Procrastination

“If I swim a mile, the first half hour might be drudgery, but somewhere in the middle it catches fire.”

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