The Marginalian
The Marginalian

Reads tagged with “psychology”

How We Render Reality: Attention as an Instrument of Love
How We Render Reality: Attention as an Instrument of Love

“Since our consciousness plays some part in what comes into being, the play of attention can both create and destroy, but it never leaves its object unchanged.”

read article

The Double Flame: Octavio Paz on Love
The Double Flame: Octavio Paz on Love

“Love is a bet, a wild one, placed on freedom. Not my own; the freedom of the Other… A knot made of two intertwined freedoms.”

read article

Let Your Heart Be Broken
Let Your Heart Be Broken

“The miracle is that we rise again out of suffering… The miracle is that we create ourselves anew.”

read article

May Sarton on Writing, Gardening, and the Importance of Patience Over Will in Creative Work
May Sarton on Writing, Gardening, and the Importance of Patience Over Will in Creative Work

“Gardening is like poetry in that it is gratuitous, and also that it cannot be done on will alone.”

read article

How to Love the World More: George Saunders on the Courage of Uncertainty
How to Love the World More: George Saunders on the Courage of Uncertainty

“In a world full of people who seem to know everything, passionately, based on little (often slanted) information, where certainty is often mistaken for power, what a relief it is to be in the company of someone confident enough to stay unsure (that is, perpetually curious).”

read article

The Last Wonder: D.H. Lawrence on Death and the Best Lifelong Preparation for It
The Last Wonder: D.H. Lawrence on Death and the Best Lifelong Preparation for It

“Know thyself, and that thou art mortal. But know thyself, denying that thou art mortal.”

read article

Henry James on Losing a Mother
Henry James on Losing a Mother

“These are hours of exquisite pain; thank Heaven this particular pang comes to us but once.”

read article

How to Grow Up: Nick Cave’s Life-Advice to a 13-Year-Old
How to Grow Up: Nick Cave’s Life-Advice to a 13-Year-Old

“Fill yourself with the beautiful stuff of the world… Get amazed. Get astonished. Get awed on a regular basis, so that getting awed is habitual and becomes a state of being.”

read article

The Art of Lying Fallow: Psychoanalyst Masud Khan on the Existential Salve for the Age of Cultish Productivity and Compulsive Distraction
The Art of Lying Fallow: Psychoanalyst Masud Khan on the Existential Salve for the Age of Cultish Productivity and Compulsive Distraction

On inviting the state of being that “allows for that larval inner experience which distinguishes true psychic creativity from obsessional productiveness.”

read article

Jealousy and Its Antidote: Pioneering Psychiatrist Leslie Farber on the Tangled Psychology of Our Most Destructive Emotion
Jealousy and Its Antidote: Pioneering Psychiatrist Leslie Farber on the Tangled Psychology of Our Most Destructive Emotion

“Every jealous person knows jealousy to be a brutally degrading experience and resists with all his might revealing the extent of his degradation.”

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.)