Hindsight is our finest instrument for discerning the patterns of our lives. To look back on a year of reading, a year of writing, is to discover a secret map of the mind, revealing the landscape...
"A way of life cannot be successful so long as it is a mere intellectual conviction. It must be deeply felt, deeply believed, dominant even in dreams."
https://www.themarginalian.org/2023/08/10/new-hopes-for-a-changing-world-russell/
"What is happiness but growth in peace."
https://www.themarginalian.org/2023/06/28/may-sarton-the-work-of-happiness/
A lovely countercultural invitation to savor the unpurchasable joys with which the world is strewn.
https://www.themarginalian.org/2019/11/20/laylas-happiness-mariahadessa-ekere-tallie/
"Owning up: to recollect, to regret, to be responsible, ultimately to forgive and love."
https://www.themarginalian.org/2018/12/19/hiking-with-nietzsche-john-kaag-eternal-return/
"It is well to fly towards the light, even where there may be some fluttering and bruising of wings against the windowpanes, is it not?"
https://www.themarginalian.org/2018/03/05/elizabeth-barrett-browning-happiness/
"What is happiness, anyhow? ... so impalpable — a mere breath, an evanescent tinge..."
https://www.themarginalian.org/2018/02/16/walt-whitman-specimen-days-happiness/
"No-one knows what your life or life itself should be because it is in the process of being created. Life moves according to a growing consciousness of life and is completely unpredictable."
https://www.themarginalian.org/2017/03/22/agnes-martin-happiness-river-of-live/
How a continuing sense of mutual discovery creates the opening to true compassion.
https://www.themarginalian.org/2016/10/19/sharon-salzberg-compassion-animation/
"The clearest message that we get from this 75-year study is this: Good relationships keep us happier and healthier."
https://www.themarginalian.org/2016/08/23/harvard-grant-study-robert-waldinger-ted/
"Why is love rich beyond all other possible human experiences and a sweet burden to those seized in its grasp? Because we become what we love and yet remain ourselves."
https://www.themarginalian.org/2016/04/25/hannah-arendt-martin-heidegger-love-letters/
"It came to me while picking beans, the secret of happiness."
https://www.themarginalian.org/2016/02/29/robin-wall-kimmerer-braiding-sweetgrass/
"In those simple relationships of loving husband and wife, affectionate sisters, children and grandmother, there are innumerable shades of sweetness and anguish which make up the pattern of our l...
https://www.themarginalian.org/2016/02/25/willa-cather-relationships/
"I know the only cure, which is to make one’s center of life inside of one’s self, not selfishly or excludingly, but with a kind of unassailable serenity."
https://www.themarginalian.org/2016/02/10/edith-wharton-happiness-alone/
"The roaring of the wind is my wife and the Stars through the window pane are my Children... I do not live in this world alone but in a thousand worlds."
https://www.themarginalian.org/2016/02/01/keats-letters-solitude/
"Age cannot manage to empty either sensual pleasure of its attractiveness or the whole world of its charm."
https://www.themarginalian.org/2016/01/28/andre-gide-aging-happiness-death/
"The Highest is not to comprehend the Highest, but to do it, and note this well, including all the burdens it involves.
https://www.themarginalian.org/2015/12/29/kierkegaard-diary-ideals/
"There is no love of life without despair of life."
https://www.themarginalian.org/2015/11/30/albert-camus-travel-lyrical-critical-essays/
"Our meaning of happiness is constantly shaped and reshaped by small choices we make every day."
https://www.themarginalian.org/2015/09/28/jennier-aaker-happiness/
"One is forced to have fun in order to be well adjusted or at least appear so to others because only well-adjusted people are accepted as normal and are likely to be successful."
https://www.themarginalian.org/2015/09/11/theodor-adorno-work-pleasure-gadgeteering/