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It is not by spectacular achievements that man can be transformed, but by will. Frey himself had made the great discovery that it is the moments which seem normal, almost tedious, that shape the soul — not the crises.

— Romain Rolland, Jean-Christophe (1912)
1d 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 universe is not hostile, nor yet is it friendly. It is simply indifferent. To that indifference man brings imagination — and that is the beginning of all we call civilization.

1w ago
themarginalian.org
Marcus Aurelius on the Good Luck of Your Bad Luck

Personhoods are staked on the cards dealt and not the hands played, as if we evolved the opposable thumbs of our agency for nothing. In memoirs and reality shows, across infinite Alexandrian scrolls of social media feeds, the unlucky events of life have become the currency of attention and identification.

1w ago

The thing I am most afraid of is that I shall be unequal to the demands that existence makes upon me, and shall waste my life in a sort of bewildered, half-conscious protest against it.

1w ago

We are not permitted to choose the frame of our destiny. But what we put into it is ours. He who wills adventure will experience it.

1w ago

The sign of a truly great business is one where the management can point to having made several decisions that were obviously wrong at the time — and survived them. Durability is not about being right; it's about being able to be wrong without dying.

1w ago

We are continually faced with great opportunities which are brilliantly disguised as unsolvable problems.

1w ago
themarginalian.org
Dostoyevsky, Just After His Death Sentence Was Repealed, on the Meaning of Life

Life is everywhere, life is in us ourselves, not outside. There will be people by my side, and to be a human being among people and to remain one forever, no matter in what circumstances, not to grow despondent and not to lose heart — that's what life is all about, that's its task. I have come to recognize that.

1w ago
themarginalian.org
How to Be Transformed When Things Fall Apart

Fear is a natural reaction to moving closer to the truth. If we commit ourselves to staying right where we are, then our experience becomes very vivid. Things become very clear when there is nowhere to escape.

1w ago

The thing is to be able to outlast the defeats. And I've had defeats. I've been licked. But I'm still here — and I think that's the secret. You must do the thing you think you cannot do, but more than that, you must endure the thing that undoes you, and then begin again without the benefit of having been undone.

2w ago
themarginalian.org
Corrective for a Broken Heart

It still beats, doesn't it, still trembles at the sight of fog flowing through the forest like a slow dance song. It was only dislocated, lost its locus for a while, popped out of the socket of good sense. There is no one to pick up the pieces because there are no pieces.

2w ago

It is not reason that gives us our moral principles, but habit and feeling. And yet the man who cannot give a reason for his virtue is in the gravest danger of losing it when circumstances change.

2w ago
themarginalian.org
Nineteen Truths and One Beguiling Lie about Life from 20 Years of The Marginalian

The process itself is a lovely reminder that life is like language — it is not the words you have, your givens, but how you configure them that makes meaning, makes beauty, makes poetry. And the loveliness of life is that we are endlessly reconfigurable, brightly capable of rewriting the story with each sentence of living.

2w ago
themarginalian.org
The Map to the Route of Your Life

This Möbius strip of longing is the root of everything we suffer in the fangs of the Wanting Monster, but it is also the root of our creative vitality: the restless urge to make, to leave a mark that says "I AM," a monument to having been. It is our incompleteness that maps the territory of the possible in us.

2w ago

The man who has no inner life is a slave to his surroundings, as the plant is a slave to the weather. But the man who has learned to live inwardly is never wholly at the mercy of circumstance, for he carries his world within him.

2w ago

The beginning of wisdom is the discovery that there exist contradictions of permanent tension with which it is necessary to live and that it is above all not necessary to seek to resolve.

2w ago

We are all sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life. And what we do with that sentence — whether we scratch at the walls or write on them — is perhaps the only freedom we are given.

2w ago
upstartsmedia.com
His Climate Startup ‘Crash Landed.’ Now He’s Reinventing Doctor Visits With Daniel Ek.

"When you're on the up with a company, everyone is your best friend. Every angel investor and their uncle is like, 'Dude, I always knew that you were the most talented person ever. We're gonna support you, you know, 'til the end of time.' And then when things don't go well, it's like, block, block, block, block, block. Like, literally no one wants to return your call."

2w ago

The demand for a meaning which the world does not supply is often disguised under a passion for metaphysics. But the real problem is not to find the world meaningful, but to endure it without meaning—and still to act.

3w ago

The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition. And yet the history of science is a history of that ambition refusing to accept the universe's indifference.

3w ago
themarginalian.org
James Baldwin on How Love (Finally) Finds You

Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word "love" here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace — not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.

3w ago

It is not the going out of port, but the coming in, that determines the success of a voyage. And yet we judge a life by its disasters, not by the quiet harbors it never left.

3w ago

The universe is transformation; life is opinion. Things do not touch the soul, for they are external and remain without; but our perturbations come only from the opinion which is within.

3w ago
themarginalian.org
How to Doubt Your Way into a Truer Life

Perhaps if you were to take in all of this life, all this experience, your heart would not be able to hold it. Perhaps it's not death we're afraid of but too much life.

3w ago

It is not by accident that the happiest people are those who make the most interesting mistakes.

4w ago

A man's character is his fate. And yet we spend our lives constructing masks so elaborate that we forget the face beneath them — until sorrow strips it bare, and we meet ourselves for the first time.

4w ago

It is not the neutrality of stone that we should seek, but the engagement of fire. The stone endures; the fire transforms. And it is only in transformation that anything lives.

4w ago

The demand for continuity is the most conservative of all human instincts, and yet without the power to change, continuity itself becomes a form of death.

4w ago

It is not given to man to take stock of what is killing him. Perhaps it is better so. Our blinkers are part of our armor.

4w ago

Most people can't distinguish between 'this is hard' and 'this is impossible.' That confusion kills more good ideas than competition ever will. The question is never whether something is hard—it's whether the difficulty is structural or merely unfamiliar.

4w ago
themarginalian.org
Against Brute Force: D.H. Lawrence on the Superpower of Vulnerability

It is all a question of sensitiveness. Brute force and overbearing may make a terrific effect. But in the end, that which lives lives by delicate sensitiveness. If it were a question of brute force, not a single human baby would survive for a fortnight.

4w ago

The snake which cannot cast its skin has to die. As well the minds which are prevented from changing their opinions; they cease to be mind.

4w ago
themarginalian.org
How to Say “YES” to Life

Beyond basic physical survival, most of our psychological suffering, when closely examined, is a form of saying "NO" to life — a refusal, vehement or subtle, to bend the idea of how things should be to the raw reality of how they are, the reality that is the only arena in which we can act to change anything. All things not pliant enough to bend will break — fragility is a function of rigidity.

4w ago
themarginalian.org
James Baldwin’s Advice on Writing

Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but most of all, endurance.

4w ago

The universe is not hostile, nor yet is it friendly. It is simply indifferent. But in this indifference lies our peculiar dignity: that we must choose, and choosing, become.

1mo ago
themarginalian.org
The Weasel and the Meaning of It All: Annie Dillard on How to Live

The weasel lives in necessity and we live in choice, hating necessity and dying at the last ignobly in its talons. I would like to live as I should, as the weasel lives as he should. And I suspect that for me the way is like the weasel's: open to time and death painlessly, noticing everything, remembering nothing, choosing the given with a fierce and pointed will.

1mo ago

The universe is not indifferent to our values. It is simply not in a hurry to confirm them. And in that delay — that terrible patience — we find either despair or philosophy.

1mo ago

It is not the neutrality of stone that we should seek, but the engagement of fire — which warms and illuminates and also, if we are careless, burns. Safety, for one who truly thinks, is the beginning of death.

1mo ago

A man who has no inner life is a slave to his surroundings, as the plant is a slave to the weather and the soil in which it grows.

1mo ago
readtheprofile.com
The Best and Worst Day of My Life

I've learned there's a massive difference between preparing for reality and suffering through imagination.

1mo ago

The trick is to make your mistakes non-fatal. You don't need to be right all the time. You just need to survive long enough to be right eventually.

1mo ago

We are continually faced with a series of great opportunities brilliantly disguised as insoluble problems.

1mo ago

Underscored — save the words that stop you in your tracks.

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