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themarginalian.org
The Art of Being Alone: May Sarton’s Stunning 1938 Ode to Solitude

But in the neutral state of aloneness, the psychoemotional line between solitude and loneliness can be as thin as a razor's edge and as lacerating to the soul.

— Maria Popova
2d ago

We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it to the full. The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it — but that is a different matter entirely.

3d ago

The demand to be loved is the greatest of all arrogant presumptions. Love is a gift, not a tribute; and the man who expects it as a due has already forfeited the capacity to receive it.

5d ago

The thing about man is that he knows what other animals do not: that he must die. And though he tries to forget it, this knowledge pursues him through his days like a creditor he cannot pay.

1w ago

The price of hating other human beings is loving oneself less. And the man who has learned to hate himself completely has achieved something very nearly like freedom.

1w ago
themarginalian.org
The Day Dostoyevsky Discovered the Meaning of Life in a Dream

Dreams are extraordinarily strange. One thing appears with terrifying clarity, with the details finely set like jewels, while you leap over another, as though you did not notice it at all — space and time, for instance. It seems that dreams are the work not of mind but of desire, not of the head but of the heart…

2w ago

It is not so much that man is a herd animal, but that he is a horde animal, led by a chief; and if he has no chief, he makes one up and idealizes him.

1mo ago
themarginalian.org
Inner Space, Outer Space, and How to Be an Astronaut in the Cosmos of Connection: Eric Berne on the Key to True Intimacy

Most human beings never really see another person after they are five years old. In an intimate relationship, each party returns to the original naïve Child ego state, where he is free of such Parental prohibitions and Adult requirements, and can see, hear, and taste in its purest form what the world has to offer. This freedom of the Child is the essential part of intimacy, and it turns the whole universe, including the sun, moon, and stars, into a golden apple for both parties to enjoy.

1mo ago

We are spinning our own fates, good or evil, and never to be undone. Every smallest stroke of virtue or of vice leaves its little scar. The drunken Rip Van Winkle, in Jefferson's play, excuses himself for every fresh dereliction by saying, 'I won't count this time!' Well, he may not count it, and a kind Heaven may not count it; but it is being counted none the less.

1mo ago

It is a fact that cannot be denied: the wickedness of others becomes our own wickedness because it kindles something evil in our own hearts.

1mo ago
themarginalian.org
How to Promise and How to Keep Promises from Breaking

Even the most sincere promise is but a tenuous handshake — not between us and others, but between our present selves and our future selves. Nothing is more discomposing to our self-image than watching ourselves break a true promise on the edge of the awful recognition that our future selves are only ever a fantasy of who we would like to be, not a prediction of who we will become.

1mo ago

The healthy man does not torture others. Generally it is the tortured who turn into torturers.

1mo ago
themarginalian.org
The True Purpose of Tarot

Just as the primary function of prayer is to clarify our own hopes and fears, to hone our priorities and reassert our values, the primary purpose of tarot is not to give us a telescope aimed at the frontiers of the future but a microscope aimed at the most elusive intricacies of the self.

1mo ago

We are all serving a life-sentence in the dungeon of self. And yet, curiously, most of us find that dungeon inhabited by someone else — something larger than we intended.

2mo ago

We are never so much disposed to quarrel with others as when we are dissatisfied with ourselves.

2mo ago
themarginalian.org
The Vocabulary of Vulnerability: 10 Wonderfully Untranslatable Words from Around the World for Complex and Difficult Emotions

We also live in culture — encoded in each language are a culture's parameters of what it is permissible to feel, which we internalize as the parameters of what it is possible to feel. It helps, then, to have a larger lexicon of emotion — larger than our given language, in order to take back the expansiveness of our experience by liberating it from the constraints of culture.

2mo ago

The capacity to be alone is the capacity to love. It may look paradoxical to you, but it is not. It is an existential truth: only those people who are capable of being alone are capable of love, of sharing, of going into the depths of another person — without possessing the other, without becoming dependent on the other.

2mo ago
themarginalian.org
Death and How to Be More Alive: Carl Jung on Immortality and the Rebirth of Middle Age

From the middle of life onward, only he remains vitally alive who is ready to die with life. For in the secret hour of life's midday the parabola is reversed, death is born. The second half of life does not signify ascent, unfolding, increase, exuberance, but death, since the end is its goal. The negation of life's fulfillment is synonymous with the refusal to accept its ending. Both mean not wanting to live, and not wanting to live is identical with not wanting to die.

3mo ago
whyisthisinteresting
The Saturday Selection, Vol. 114

"…is the tendency for adults over forty to have increased or enhanced recollection for events that occurred during their adolescence and early adulthood."

3mo ago
themarginalian.org
Carl Jung on Creativity

The creative act, which is the absolute antithesis of mere reaction, will forever elude the human understanding. It can only be described in its manifestations; it can be obscurely sensed, but never wholly grasped.

3mo ago
themarginalian.org
The Art of the Sacred Pause and Despair as a Catalyst of Regeneration

Somehow the despondency thus treated becomes pregnant with an access to new vitality. The organism needs to lie dormant whilst its latent energies are gathering strength for activity on a fresh plane. It is important, moreover, to observe that, so long as there is growth, the fresh plane is likewise a higher plane.

3mo ago

The most thought-provoking thing in our over-thought world is that most people never think at all. And those who do think do not think enough — for most of their thinking is thinking about their thinking, which is no thinking at all.

3mo ago

We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it to the full.

3mo ago

It is not so much our friends' help that helps us, as the confidence of their help.

4mo ago

The mind is a collection of surfaces, and we must learn to read the signs written upon them—to distinguish between the scratches of accident and the marks of intention.

5mo ago

The mind is like an iceberg, it floats with one-seventh of its bulk above water.

5mo ago
jefftweedy
Judy Just Left (Ball of Light) (2026 Revision)

What I'm talking about is a moment where you can be convinced that there's an unknown, deeper order for things. A meaning behind it all, even if we're just trying to apply meaning to coincidence. But it's sweet enough, to me, even if it's just a reminder that we make meaning.

5mo ago

The mind is furnished with a set of instincts which seek out certain kinds of phenomena and are angered by their absence and immediately go in search of them.

5mo ago
asteriskmag.com
Boarding China’s Last Bus

But for a population that lived through the mass layoffs of the 1990s, optimism and fear can look identical from the outside.

5mo ago
3quarksdaily.com
The Secret to Ending Arguments Faster

When you see anger, it's just the tip of the iceberg. Anger is the secondary emotion. The primary emotion could be sadness, could be disappointment, could be stress.

5mo ago

The true paradox of consciousness is that we are never more fully ourselves than when we have forgotten ourselves—and this forgetting is not a loss but a gain, for in losing the boundary of self we touch something universal.

5mo ago
noahpinion.blog
Dating advice for men

A lot of men — maybe even most men — get emotionally attached to our sex partners. There are well-known natural mechanisms for this. For those guys, going through one woman after another, again and again, for years and years, is just making and breaking those attachments again and again. That's not fun, that's self-punishment.

5mo ago

The mind is furnished with a set of instincts which seek out certain kinds of phenomena and are angered by their absence and appalled by alien forms; which love them when found, but will have none of them when not directly forced upon us.

5mo ago

The human mind is a dark forest, full of wild life and monsters. We do not know what we are, we can only see small lights in the forest of our unconsciousness, as it were luminous, phosphorescent flowers and night-blossoms.

5mo ago

We accept the verdict of the past until the need for change cries out loudly enough to force upon us a choice between the comforts of further compliance and the discomforts of further change.

6mo ago
whyisthisinteresting
The Saturday Selection, Vol. 103

Before purchasing the dress, she was asked to sign a legal waiver acknowledging that the dress did not represent her current size.

6mo ago

The human mind is a dark forest, full of wild life and monsters. We do not know what is in there. We do not know how we think.

6mo ago

The mind is furnished with a set of instincts which seek out certain kinds of phenomena and are angered by their absence and impatient of delay in their arrival. It is the absence of the phenomena, not their presence, which is the true cause of the intellectual excitement we feel.

6mo ago

The principle of parsimony suggests that entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity; yet in the study of human nature, we continually discover that the simple explanation was merely the one we had grown comfortable defending.

6mo ago

The mind is furnished with a set of instincts which seek out certain kinds of phenomena and to avoid others, to make much of some impressions, little of others. It is thus a subjective instrument, and bears the stamp of subjectivity upon all it apprehends.

6mo ago

The mind is furnished with a set of instincts which seek out certain kinds of phenomena and ignore the rest. The immediate fact which the science of logic has to take account of is that certain material is presented, certain aspects of this material are noted and emphasized.

6mo ago

The mind is furnished with a set of instincts which seek out certain kinds of phenomena and are indifferent to others, remaining by nature blind to facts that are uncongenial to them.

6mo ago

The mind is furnished with a set of instincts which seek out certain kinds of phenomena and are on the alert for them, and especially apt to be lively and to produce the感 of reality whenever they are stimulated.

6mo ago

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