The Marginalian
The Marginalian

Reads tagged with “Adam Phillips”

“Little Prince” Author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry on Love, Mortality, and Night as an Existential Clarifying Force for the Deepest Truths of the Heart
“Little Prince” Author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry on Love, Mortality, and Night as an Existential Clarifying Force for the Deepest Truths of the Heart

“Day belongs to family quarrels, but with the night he who has quarreled finds love again. For love is greater than any wind of words… Love is not thinking, but being.”

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16 Overall Favorite Books of 2016
16 Overall Favorite Books of 2016

From loneliness to love to black holes, by way of Neil Gaiman, Annie Dillard, and Mary Oliver.

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Why We Fall in Love: The Paradoxical Psychology of Romance and Why Frustration Is Necessary for Satisfaction
Why We Fall in Love: The Paradoxical Psychology of Romance and Why Frustration Is Necessary for Satisfaction

“All love stories are frustration stories… To fall in love is to be reminded of a frustration that you didn’t know you had.”

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How Kindness Became Our Forbidden Pleasure
How Kindness Became Our Forbidden Pleasure

“We are never as kind as we want to be, but nothing outrages us more than people being unkind to us.”

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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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How to Live with Death
How to Live with Death

Psychoanalyst Adam Phillips on how Darwin and Freud reframed our mortality as an organizing principle of human life.

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Against Self-Criticism: Adam Phillips on How Our Internal Critics Enslave Us, the Stockholm Syndrome of the Superego, and the Power of Multiple Interpretations
Against Self-Criticism: Adam Phillips on How Our Internal Critics Enslave Us, the Stockholm Syndrome of the Superego, and the Power of Multiple Interpretations

“In broaching the possibility of being, in some way, against self-criticism, we have to imagine a world in which celebration is less suspect than criticism.”

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In Praise of Missing Out: Psychoanalyst Adam Phillips on the Paradoxical Value of Our Unlived Lives
In Praise of Missing Out: Psychoanalyst Adam Phillips on the Paradoxical Value of Our Unlived Lives

“Our lived lives might become a protracted mourning for, or an endless tantrum about, the lives we were unable to live. But the exemptions we suffer, whether forced or chosen, make us who we are.”

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On Being Too Much for Ourselves: Psychoanalyst Adam Phillips on Balance and the Necessary Excesses of Life
On Being Too Much for Ourselves: Psychoanalyst Adam Phillips on Balance and the Necessary Excesses of Life

“There are situations in which it is more dangerous to keep your balance than to lose it.”

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Adam Phillips on Why a Capacity for “Fertile Solitude” Is Essential for Self-Esteem and Healthy Relationships
Adam Phillips on Why a Capacity for “Fertile Solitude” Is Essential for Self-Esteem and Healthy Relationships

From teenage rebellion to self-reliance, how we learn to be alone.

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