psychology

Octavia Butler’s Advice on Writing

“No matter how tired you get, no matter how you feel like you can’t possibly do this, somehow you do.” …

0
Like
Save
The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating: An Uncommon Meditation on Presence and the Aperture of Wonder

“Survival often depends on a specific focus: a relationship, a belief, or a hope balanced on the edge of possibility.” …

0
Like
Save
The Courage to Be Yourself: Virginia Woolf on How to Hear Your Soul

“Beyond the difficulty of communicating oneself, there is the supreme difficulty of being oneself.” …

0
Like
Save
Milan Kundera on the Power of Coincidences and the Musicality of How Chance Composes Our Lives

“Human lives… are composed like music. Guided by his sense of beauty, an individual transforms a fortuitous occurrence… into a motif, which then assumes a permanent place in the composition of the individual’s life.” …

0
Like
Save
How to Eat the Sun: A Blind Hero of the Resistance on Accessing the Light Within and Touching the Oneness of the World

“There is only one world. Things outside only exist if you go to meet them with everything you carry in yourself. As to the things inside, you will never see them well unless you allow those outside to enter in.” …

0
Like
Save
The Moon and the Yew Tree: Patti Smith Reads Sylvia Plath’s Haunting Portrait of Depression

“This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary.” …

0
Like
Save
Uses of the Erotic: Audre Lorde on the Relationship Between Eros, Creativity, and Power

“There is, for me, no difference between writing a good poem and moving into sunlight against the body of a woman I love.” …

0
Like
Save
The Porcupine Dilemma: Schopenhauer’s Parable about Negotiating the Optimal Distance in Love

This is the supreme challenge of intimacy — how to reconcile the aching yearning for closeness with the painful pressures of actually being close, how to forge a bond tight enough to feel the warmth of connection but spacious enough to feel free. Kahlil Gibran knew this when he contemplated the vital balance of intimacy and independence, urging lovers to “love one another but make not a bond of love: Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.” Rilke knew it when he reckoned with the difficult art of giving space in love, observing that… read article …

0
Like
Save
Excellent Advice for Living: Kevin Kelly’s Life-Tested Wisdom He Wished He Knew Earlier

“The chief prevention against getting old is to remain astonished.” …

0
Like
Save
How to Say Goodbye: An Illustrated Field Guide to Accompanying a Loved One at the End of Life

“If you don’t know what to say, start by saying that… That opens things up.” …

0
Like
Save
Love’s Work: Philosopher Gillian Rose on the Value of Getting It Wrong

“You may be weaker than the whole world but you are always stronger than yourself. Let me send my power against my power… Let me discover what it is that I want and fear from love. Power and love, might and grace.” …

0
Like
Save
How to Be More Alive: Hermann Hesse on Wonder and the Proper Aim of Education

“While wandering down the path of wonder, I briefly escape the world of separation and enter the world of unity.” …

0
Like
Save
How People Change: Psychoanalyst Allen Wheelis on the Essence of Freedom and the Two Elements of Self-Transcendence

“We create ourselves. The sequence is suffering, insight, will, action, change.” …

0
Like
Save
Reason and Emotion: Scottish Philosopher John Macmurray on the Key to Wholeness and the Fundaments of a Fulfilling Life

“The emotional life is not simply a part or an aspect of human life. It is not, as we so often think, subordinate, or subsidiary to the mind. It is the core and essence of human life. The intellect arises out of it, is rooted in it, draws its nourishment and sustenance from it.” …

0
Like
Save
An Antidote to the Anxiety About Imperfection: Parenting Advice from Mister Rogers

“It’s part of being human to fall short of that total acceptance and ultimate understanding — and often far short.” …

0
Like
Save
The Experience Machine: Cognitive Philosopher Andy Clark on the Power of Expectation and How the Mind Renders Reality

“We are never simply seeing what’s ‘really there,’ stripped bare of our own anticipations or insulated from our own past experiences. Instead, all human experience is part phantom — the product of deep-set predictions.” …

0
Like
Save
Between Matter and Spirit: Psychoanalyst Allen Wheelis on the Substance of What We Are

“We are carriers of spirit… into a future unknown, unknowable, and in continual creation.” …

0
Like
Save
Everything Is Already There: Javier Marías on the Courage to Heed Your Intuitions

“This has nothing to do with premonitions, there is nothing supernatural or mysterious about it, what’s mysterious is that we pay no heed to it.” …

0
Like
Save
Kierkegaard on the Value of Despair

“To despair over oneself, in despair to want to be rid of oneself, is the formula for all despair.” …

0
Like
Save
A Taste of How It Feels to Be Free: Pioneering Psychoanalyst Karen Horney on Our Inner Conflicts, the Psychology of Hopelessness, and the Path to Wholeness

“The most comprehensive formulation of therapeutic goals is the striving for wholeheartedness: to be without pretense, to be emotionally sincere, to be able to put the whole of oneself into one’s feelings, one’s work, one’s beliefs. It can be approximated only to the extent that conflicts are resolved.” …

0
Like
Save
William James on the Most Vital Understanding for Successful Relationships

“Neither the whole of truth nor the whole of good is revealed to any single observer.” …

0
Like
Save
The Challenge of Closeness: Alain de Botton on Love, Vulnerability, and the Paradox of Avoidance

The psychological machinery of our commonest coping mechanism for the terror of hurt, rejection, and abandonment. …

0
Like
Save
May Sarton on the Art of Living Alone

“The people we love are built into us.” …

0
Like
Save
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.” …

0
Like
Save
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.” …

0
Like
Save