Brain Pickings
Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings is my favourite follow “A one-woman labour of love exploring what it means to live a decent, substantive, rewarding life,” as she “searches for meaning across literature, science, art, philosophy, and the various other tentacles of human thought and feeling.”
Each of the articles below is worth reading (it’s all worth reading). I’ve picked a quote from each that stood out.
“To have loved is to have known the straightjacket of irrationality that slips over even the most willful mind when the heart takes over with its delicious carelessness.”
- Maria Popova, from Hannah Arendt on Love and How to Live with the Fundamental Fear of Loss
“All love stories are frustration stories… To fall in love is to be reminded of a frustration that you didn’t know you had (of one’s formative frustrations, and of one’s attempted self-cures for them); you wanted someone, you felt deprived of something, and then it seems to be there. And what is renewed in that experience is an intensity of frustration, and an intensity of satisfaction. It is as if, oddly, you were waiting for someone but you didn’t know who they were until they arrived. Whether or not you were aware that there was something missing in your life, you will be when you meet the person you want. What psychoanalysis will add to this love story is that the person you fall in love with really is the man or woman of your dreams; that you have dreamed them up before you met them; not out of nothing — nothing comes of nothing — but out of prior experience, both real and wished for. You recognize them with such certainty because you already, in a certain sense, know them; and because you have quite literally been expecting them, you feel as though you have known them for ever, and yet, at the same time, they are quite foreign to you. They are familiar foreign bodies.”
- Adam Phillips, from his book Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life.
Brain Pickings Article: Why We Fall in Love: The Paradoxical Psychology of Romance and Why Frustration Is Necessary for Satisfaction
“Most men, the herd, have never tasted solitude. They leave father and mother, but only to crawl to a wife and quietly succumb to new warmth and ties. They are never alone, they never commune with themselves. And when a solitary man crosses their path, they fear him and hate him like the plague; they fling stones at home and find no peace until they are far away from him. The air around him smells of stars, of cold stellar spaces; he lacks the soft warm fragrance of the home and hatchery.”
- Hermann Hesse
Brain Pickings Article: Herman Hesse on Solitude, The Value of Hardship, the Courage to Be Yourself, and How to Find Your Destiny