The Marginalian
The Marginalian

Reads tagged with “philosophy”

Sense of Nonsense: Alan Watts on How We Find Meaning by Surrendering to Meaninglessness
Sense of Nonsense: Alan Watts on How We Find Meaning by Surrendering to Meaninglessness

“It is in this kind of meaninglessness that we come to the profoundest meaning.”

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Umberto Eco’s Antilibrary: Why Unread Books Are More Valuable to Our Lives than Read Ones
Umberto Eco’s Antilibrary: Why Unread Books Are More Valuable to Our Lives than Read Ones

How to become an “antischolar” in a culture that treats knowledge as “an ornament that allows us to rise in the pecking order.”

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Thoreau on What It Really Means to Be Awake
Thoreau on What It Really Means to Be Awake

“I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by conscious endeavor.”

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André Gide on Sincerity, Being vs. Appearing, and What It Really Means to Be Yourself
André Gide on Sincerity, Being vs. Appearing, and What It Really Means to Be Yourself

“Don’t ever do anything through affectation or to make people like you or through imitation or for the pleasure of contradicting.”

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The Soul-Expanding Value of Difficulty: Rilke on How Great Sadnesses Transform Us and Bring Us Closer to Ourselves
The Soul-Expanding Value of Difficulty: Rilke on How Great Sadnesses Transform Us and Bring Us Closer to Ourselves

“That is at bottom the only courage that is demanded of us: to have courage for the most strange, the most singular and the most inexplicable that we may encounter.”

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Reinventing the Secular Sermon: Remarkable Commencement Addresses by Nora Ephron, David Foster Wallace, Ira Glass, and More
Reinventing the Secular Sermon: Remarkable Commencement Addresses by Nora Ephron, David Foster Wallace, Ira Glass, and More

How to live life “on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.”

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Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, Animated: History’s Greatest Parable Exploring the Nature of Reality
Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, Animated: History’s Greatest Parable Exploring the Nature of Reality

“Life is like being chained up in a cave forced to watch shadows flitting across a stone wall.”

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In Defense of Boredom: 200 Years of Ideas on the Virtues of Not-Doing from Some of Humanity’s Greatest Minds
In Defense of Boredom: 200 Years of Ideas on the Virtues of Not-Doing from Some of Humanity’s Greatest Minds

Bertrand Russell, Søren Kierkegaard, Andrei Tarkovsky, Susan Sontag, Adam Phillips, Renata Adler, and more.

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Radiant Fatherhood: A Playful and Profound 1925 Meditation on Gender Stereotypes and the Rewards of Parenting
Radiant Fatherhood: A Playful and Profound 1925 Meditation on Gender Stereotypes and the Rewards of Parenting

“It is our knowledge — the things we are sure of — that makes the world go wrong and keeps us from seeing and learning.”

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The Unlikely Roads That Lead Us Back to Ourselves: Eve Ensler on How a Tree Saved Her Life
The Unlikely Roads That Lead Us Back to Ourselves: Eve Ensler on How a Tree Saved Her Life

An emboldening story of reawakening to the “insane delight” of merely being.

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