thought and opinion
When I’m reading I consider it an activity as difficult as writing… It’s a challenge to your whole self. I love writing that is respectful of the human capacity to understand.
Humor, more than anything else in the human make-up, can afford an aloofness and an ability to rise above any situation, even if only for a few seconds.
brainpickings.orgThe life that you live in order to photograph it is already, at the outset, a commemoration of itself.
brainpickings.orgBy all that is sacred in our hopes for the human race, I conjure those who love happiness and truth, to give a fair trial to the vegetable system.
It is often very illuminating… to ask yourself how you got at the facts on which you base your opinion. Who actually saw, heard, felt, counted, named the thing, about which you have an opinion? Was it the man who told you, or the man who told him, or someone still further removed? And how much was he permitted to see?
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You can ask yourself these questions, but you can rarely answer them. They will remind you, however, of the distance which often separates your public opinion from the event with which it deals. And the reminder is itself a protection.
Excerpts from Walter Lippmann’s 1922 classic Public Opinion – a timeless and intensely timely read on the psychology of deception, self-delusion, and the discipline of apprehending reality clearly, as applicable to politics as it is to our personal relations and the social dynamics of any community.
To see takes time, like to have a friend takes time.
Ideas, written ideas, are special. They are the way we transmit our stories … from one generation to the next. If we lose them, we lose our shared history. We lose much of what makes us human.
Everything belonging to the tree is in this: its form and structure, its colours and chemical composition, its intercourse with the elements and with the stars, are all present in a single whole.
The tree is no impression, no play of my imagination, no value depending on my mood; but it is bodied over against me and has to do with me, as I with it — only in a different way.
Let no attempt be made to sap the strength from the meaning of the relation: relation is mutual.
Consider the Tree — philosopher
Martin Buber on the discipline of not objectifying and the difficult art of seeing others as they are, not as they are to us.
The object of art is not to make salable pictures. It is to save yourself… Most people remain all of their lives in a stupor. The point of being an artist is that you may live.
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming.
Every man or woman who is sane, every man or woman who has the feeling of being a person in the world, and for whom the world means something, every happy person, is in infinite debt to a woman.
Pioneering psychiatrist and pediatrician
Donald Winnicott, who may be responsible for more psychoemotionally healthy humans than any other practitioner, was born on this day in 1896. His timeless wisdom on
the mother’s role in society.
All I ask is that, in the midst of a murderous world, we agree to reflect on murder and to make a choice. After that, we can distinguish those who accept the consequences of being murderers themselves or the accomplices of murderers, and those who refuse to do so with all their force and being.
