The Marginalian
The Marginalian

Reads tagged with “books”

How to Own Your Weakness: Alan Watts on the Confucian Concept of Jen and the Dangers of Self-Righteousness
How to Own Your Weakness: Alan Watts on the Confucian Concept of Jen and the Dangers of Self-Righteousness

“Trust in human nature is acceptance of the good-and-bad of it, and it is hard to trust those who do not admit their own weakness.”

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Mars and Our Search for Meaning: A Planetary Scientist’s Love Letter to Life
Mars and Our Search for Meaning: A Planetary Scientist’s Love Letter to Life

“It is the search for infinity, the search for evidence that our capacious universe might hold life elsewhere, in a different place or at a different time or in a different form.”

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The Courage to Be Yourself: Virginia Woolf on How to Hear Your Soul
The Courage to Be Yourself: Virginia Woolf on How to Hear Your Soul

“Beyond the difficulty of communicating oneself, there is the supreme difficulty of being oneself.”

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How to Live in Light: A Blind Hero of the French Resistance on Seeing the Heart of Life and Contacting the Oneness of Being
How to Live in Light: A Blind Hero of the French Resistance on Seeing the Heart of Life and Contacting the Oneness of Being

“There is only one world. Things outside only exist if you go to meet them with everything you carry in yourself. As to the things inside, you will never see them well unless you allow those outside to enter in.”

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Leaning Toward Light: A Posy of Poems Celebrating the Joys and Consolations of the Garden
Leaning Toward Light: A Posy of Poems Celebrating the Joys and Consolations of the Garden

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Octavia Butler’s Advice on Writing
Octavia Butler’s Advice on Writing

“No matter how tired you get, no matter how you feel like you can’t possibly do this, somehow you do.”

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The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating: An Uncommon Meditation on Presence and the Aperture of Wonder
The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating: An Uncommon Meditation on Presence and the Aperture of Wonder

“Survival often depends on a specific focus: a relationship, a belief, or a hope balanced on the edge of possibility.”

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Milan Kundera on the Power of Coincidences and the Musicality of How Chance Composes Our Lives
Milan Kundera on the Power of Coincidences and the Musicality of How Chance Composes Our Lives

“Human lives… are composed like music. Guided by his sense of beauty, an individual transforms a fortuitous occurrence… into a motif, which then assumes a permanent place in the composition of the individual’s life.”

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The Moon and the Yew Tree: Patti Smith Reads Sylvia Plath’s Haunting Portrait of Depression
The Moon and the Yew Tree: Patti Smith Reads Sylvia Plath’s Haunting Portrait of Depression

“This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary.”

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Notes on Complexity: A Buddhist Scientist on the Murmuration of Being
Notes on Complexity: A Buddhist Scientist on the Murmuration of Being

“You are this body, and you are these molecules, and you are these atoms, and you are these quantum entities, and you are the quantum foam, and you are the energetic field of space-time, and, ultimately, you are the fundamental awareness out of which all these emerge.”

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