The Marginalian
The Marginalian

Search results for “habit”

Creativity in the Time of COVID: Zadie Smith on Writing, Love, and What Echoes Through the Hallway of Time Suddenly Emptied of Habit
Creativity in the Time of COVID: Zadie Smith on Writing, Love, and What Echoes Through the Hallway of Time Suddenly Emptied of Habit

“There is no great difference between novels and banana bread. They are both just something to do. They are no substitute for love… Love is not something to do, but… something to go through — that must be why it frightens so many of us and why we so often approach it indirectly.”

read article

The Habits of Light: A Celebration of Pioneering Astronomer Henrietta Leavitt, Whose Calculations Proved That the Universe Is Expanding
The Habits of Light: A Celebration of Pioneering Astronomer Henrietta Leavitt, Whose Calculations Proved That the Universe Is Expanding

“The universe is made of distance and of dust.”

read article

Pioneering Psychologist William James on Attention, Multitasking, and the Mental Habit That Sets Great Minds Apart
Pioneering Psychologist William James on Attention, Multitasking, and the Mental Habit That Sets Great Minds Apart

“My experience is what I agree to attend to.”

read article

Proust on What Art Does for the Soul and How to Stop Letting Habit Blunt Our Aliveness
Proust on What Art Does for the Soul and How to Stop Letting Habit Blunt Our Aliveness

“Artists are people who strip habit away and return life to its deserved glory.”

read article

Mary Oliver on How Habit Gives Shape to Our Inner Lives
Mary Oliver on How Habit Gives Shape to Our Inner Lives

“The patterns of our lives reveal us. Our habits measure us.”

read article

How to Rewire Your Broken Behavioral Patterns: Shakespeare’s Advice on Acquiring Better Habits
How to Rewire Your Broken Behavioral Patterns: Shakespeare’s Advice on Acquiring Better Habits

“Assume a virtue, if you have it not.”

read article

Hermann Hesse on Little Joys, Breaking the Trance of Busyness, and the Most Important Habit for Living with Presence
Hermann Hesse on Little Joys, Breaking the Trance of Busyness, and the Most Important Habit for Living with Presence

“The high value put upon every minute of time, the idea of hurry-hurry as the most important objective of living, is unquestionably the most dangerous enemy of joy.”

read article

The Genes of the Soul: Amin Maalouf on Belonging, Conflict, and How We Inhabit Our Identity
The Genes of the Soul: Amin Maalouf on Belonging, Conflict, and How We Inhabit Our Identity

“A person’s identity… is like a pattern drawn on a tightly stretched parchment. Touch just one part of it, just one allegiance, and the whole person will react, the whole drum will sound.”

read article

Better than Before: A Psychological Field Guide to Harnessing the Transformative Power of Habit
Better than Before: A Psychological Field Guide to Harnessing the Transformative Power of Habit

How to lay a steadfast foundation for “the invisible architecture of daily life.”

read article

How Long It Takes to Form a New Habit
How Long It Takes to Form a New Habit

Why magic numbers always require a grain of empirical salt.

read article

View Full Site

The Marginalian participates in the Bookshop.org and Amazon.com affiliate programs, designed to provide a means for sites to earn commissions by linking to books. In more human terms, this means that whenever you buy a book from a link here, I receive a small percentage of its price, which goes straight back into my own colossal biblioexpenses. Privacy policy. (TLDR: You're safe — there are no nefarious "third parties" lurking on my watch or shedding crumbs of the "cookies" the rest of the internet uses.)