The Marginalian
The Marginalian

Reads tagged with “culture”

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.”

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Loving the Tree of Life: Annie Dillard on How to Bear Your Mortality
Loving the Tree of Life: Annie Dillard on How to Bear Your Mortality

“We live and move by splitting the light of the present, as a canoe’s bow parts water.”

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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.”

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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.”

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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.”

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Consciousness, Artificial Intelligence, and Our Search for Meaning: Oliver Sacks on ChatGPT, 30 Years Before ChatGPT
Consciousness, Artificial Intelligence, and Our Search for Meaning: Oliver Sacks on ChatGPT, 30 Years Before ChatGPT

“We read excitedly of the latest chemical, computational, or quantum theory of mind, and then ask, ‘Is that all there is to it?'”

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Practical Mysticism: Evelyn Underhill’s Stunning Century-Old Manifesto for Secular Transcendence and Seeing the Heart of Reality
Practical Mysticism: Evelyn Underhill’s Stunning Century-Old Manifesto for Secular Transcendence and Seeing the Heart of Reality

“Because mystery is horrible to us, we have agreed for the most part to live in a world of labels; to make of them the current coin of experience, and ignore their merely symbolic character, the infinite gradation of values which they misrepresent.”

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Heroism and the Human Search for Meaning: Ernest Becker on the Hidden Root of Our Existential Longing
Heroism and the Human Search for Meaning: Ernest Becker on the Hidden Root of Our Existential Longing

“To become conscious of what one is doing to earn his feeling of heroism is the main self-analytic problem of life.”

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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.”

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The Afterlives of the Soul: Sister Nivedita on Love and Death
The Afterlives of the Soul: Sister Nivedita on Love and Death

“To the soul, time does not exist. Only her own great purpose exists, shining clear and steady through the mists before her.”

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