The Marginalian
The Marginalian

Reads tagged with “psychology”

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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Marcus Aurelius on How to Live Through Difficult Times
Marcus Aurelius on How to Live Through Difficult Times

“Accept everything which happens, even if it seem disagreeable, because it leads to this, the health of the universe.”

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The Trailblazing 18th-Century Woman of Letters Germaine de Staël on Ambition and the Crucial Difference Between Ego and Genius
The Trailblazing 18th-Century Woman of Letters Germaine de Staël on Ambition and the Crucial Difference Between Ego and Genius

“True glory cannot be obtained by relative celebrity.”

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Pioneering Mathematician G.H. Hardy on How to Find Your Purpose and What Is Most Worth Aspiring for
Pioneering Mathematician G.H. Hardy on How to Find Your Purpose and What Is Most Worth Aspiring for

“If a man has any genuine talent he should be ready to make almost any sacrifice in order to cultivate it to the full.”

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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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Little Panic: A Literary Laboratory Exploring What It Is Like to Live in the Stranglehold of Anxiety and What It Takes to Break Free
Little Panic: A Literary Laboratory Exploring What It Is Like to Live in the Stranglehold of Anxiety and What It Takes to Break Free

“This terrible truth binds us all: fear there’s a single, unattainable, correct way to be human.”

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William James on Consciousness and the Four Features of Transcendent Experiences
William James on Consciousness and the Four Features of Transcendent Experiences

“Our normal waking consciousness… is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different… No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded.”

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Nabokov’s Synesthetic Alphabet: From the Weathered Wood of A to the Thundercloud of Z
Nabokov’s Synesthetic Alphabet: From the Weathered Wood of A to the Thundercloud of Z

“The long A of the English alphabet… has for me the tint of weathered wood, but a French A evokes polished ebony.”

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Spontaneity and the Search for Meaning: Erich Fromm on the Wellspring of Individuality, Creativity, and Love
Spontaneity and the Search for Meaning: Erich Fromm on the Wellspring of Individuality, Creativity, and Love

“Spontaneous activity is the one way in which man can overcome the terror of aloneness… for in the spontaneous realization of the self man unites himself anew with the world — with man, nature, and himself.”

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The Paradox of Freedom: The Great Humanistic Philosopher and Psychologist Erich Fromm on Moral Aloneness and Our Mightiest Antidote to Terror
The Paradox of Freedom: The Great Humanistic Philosopher and Psychologist Erich Fromm on Moral Aloneness and Our Mightiest Antidote to Terror

“Modern man still is anxious and tempted to surrender his freedom to dictators of all kinds, or to lose it by transforming himself into a small cog in the machine.”

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