The Marginalian
The Marginalian

Reads tagged with “psychology”

Love and Fear: A Stunning 17th-Century Poem About How to Live with the Transcendent Terror of Love
Love and Fear: A Stunning 17th-Century Poem About How to Live with the Transcendent Terror of Love

“Love bade me welcome; yet my soul drew back.”

read article

The Paradox of Free Will
The Paradox of Free Will

The neuroscience, physics, and philosophy of freedom in a universe of fixed laws.

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

What It Takes to Grow: Pioneering Psychoanalyst Karen Horney on the Key to Self-Realization
What It Takes to Grow: Pioneering Psychoanalyst Karen Horney on the Key to Self-Realization

“Self-knowledge… is not an aim in itself, but a means of liberating the forces of spontaneous growth. In this sense, to work at ourselves becomes not only the prime moral obligation, but… the prime moral privilege.”

read article

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

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

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.)