Romanian Philosopher Emil Cioran on the Courage to Disillusion Yourself| The Marginalian
“Art is a form of consciousness.”| The Marginalian
“Most of the interesting art of our time is boring.”| The Marginalian
How the light and heat of the sun made their way into your fireplace.| The Marginalian
“When you give people more control over the flow of information and decision making in their communities, their social health improves — incrementally, in fits and starts, but also inex…| The Marginalian
“Nothing is mysterious, no human relation. Except love.” Artist Wendy MacNaughton captures Sontag’s most private meditations on love.| The Marginalian
“There is a great deal that either has to be given up or be taken away from you if you are going to succeed in writing a body of work.”| The Marginalian
“Aphoristic thinking is impatient thinking.”| The Marginalian
“A just/ discriminating censorship is impossible.”| The Marginalian
Would you steal to save a loved one’s life, and how would you justify doing or not doing it?| The Marginalian
I recently had the pleasure of meeting the wonderful Gretchen Rubin of The Happiness Project fame, who inspired me to excavate an old pet project of mine featured here a few years ago: An explorato…| The Marginalian
Trailblazing Graphic Designer Paula Scher on Creativity| The Marginalian
The Countercultural Sanity of the Irrational: Pioneering Psychiatrist Otto Rank on the Blind Spots of Reason| The Marginalian
“Every individual is representative of the whole, a symptom, and should be intimately understood.”| The Marginalian
“It’s only when we demand that we are hurt.”| The Marginalian
“Our whole theory of education is based on the absurd notion that we must learn to swim on land before tackling the water. It applies to the pursuit of the arts as well as to the pursuit of k…| The Marginalian
In response to yesterday’s brilliant letter from Mark Twain to Helen Keller, addressing the myth of originality, reader Skip Zilla flags this beautiful passage by Henry Miller, from the antho…| The Marginalian
A Visual History of New York City’s Destruction in 200 Years of Fiction| The Marginalian
“Who we are and who we become depends, in part, on whom we love.”| The Marginalian
“Character — the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life — is the source from which self-respect springs.”| The Marginalian
What Iraqi kebob vendors have to do with your New Year’s resolutions.| The Marginalian
How the dynamics of temperament fluctuate with social context.| The Marginalian
On grit, storytelling, and bridging the gap between good taste and great work.| The Marginalian
Why Science-Fiction Writers Are So Good at Predicting the Future| The Marginalian
“This is what the real, no bullshit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unc…| The Marginalian
“Don’t think about things, just do them; don’t predict them, just make them.”| The Marginalian
“You live out the confusions until they become clear.”| The Marginalian
“The mystery of being is a permanent mystery, at least given the present state of the human brain.”| The Marginalian
“However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light.”| The Marginalian
On love, liberty, and the pursuit of silence.| The Marginalian
Stumbling on happiness in pursuit of the unknown.| The Marginalian
“The secret of success is… to be fully awake to everything about you.”| The Marginalian
“Love is a fog that burns with the first daylight of reality.”| The Marginalian
“The wind won’t stop, but the house will hold.”| The Marginalian
“Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.” Fantastic excerpt from a rare 1995 interview.| The Marginalian
A bittersweet remembrance of the great Stephen Jay Gould, or what Nabokov’s butterflies have to do with literature and living the American dream.| The Marginalian
The Visual Cliff: What a 1960 Perception Experiment Reveals About Emotional Decision-Making| The Marginalian
Legendary psychologist Philip Zimbardo, best-known for his studies of human evil, spins 180 degrees in his new project aiming to harness the untapped human capacity for good.| The Marginalian
Al Jaffee’s Iconic MAD Fold-Ins: The Definitive Collection, 1964-2010| The Marginalian
E. chromi: Designer Bacteria for Color-Coded Disease Detection| The Marginalian
“So much depends on what we can make of what happens to us.”| The Marginalian
In nearly two decades of The Marginalian, nothing has stirred a more passionate response from readers than the strangest, most sidewise, most private of my labors — the bird divinations I ori…| The Marginalian
“Don’t bother about the commas which aren’t there, read the words. Don’t worry about the sense that is there, read the words faster.”| The Marginalian
From evil stepmothers to Edward Gorey, or what Richard Dawkins has to do with Hindu deities and iPad parodies.| The Marginalian
“We humanize what is going on in the world and in ourselves only by speaking of it, and in the course of speaking of it we learn to be human.”| The Marginalian
“If you don’t understand yourself you don’t understand anybody else.”| The Marginalian
“He taught me how to see, and how to trust what I saw.”| The Marginalian
“It may be more difficult to reach the whirling mind of a modern reader but it is possible to cut through the noise and reach the quiet zone. In the quiet zone we may find that he is devoutly…| The Marginalian
“The Artist is no other than he who unlearns what he has learned, in order to know himself.”| The Marginalian
“Whether you succeed or not is irrelevant—there is no such thing. Making your unknown known is the important thing—and keeping the unknown always beyond you…”| The Marginalian
“A society must assume that it is stable, but the artist must know, and he must let us know, that there is nothing stable under heaven.”| The Marginalian
“The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is … to help man endure by lifting his heart.”| The Marginalian
“The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena.”| The Marginalian
“The aggregate of our joy and suffering…every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization…every young couple in love…lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunb…| The Marginalian
Lovely animated adaptation of the iconic Carl Sagan classic.| The Marginalian
“If the only tool we have ultimately to use is our lives, so we use it in the way we can by choosing a way to live that will demonstrate the way we feel and the way we know.”| The Marginalian
“Reality is what we take to be true. What we take to be true is what we believe… What we believe determines what we take to be true.”| The Marginalian
“Love… is the honoring of others in a way that grants them the grace of their own autonomy and allows mutual discovery.”| The Marginalian
A heartening testament to “the triumph of meritocracy” and to the idea that “each of us should be allowed to rise as far as our talent and hard work can take us.”| The Marginalian
Ada Lovelace, Marie Curie, Jane Goodall, Mae Jemison, and more pioneers who conquered curiosity against tremendous cultural odds.| The Marginalian
How a sole “scruffy signal” jokingly attributed to “little green men” forever changed our image of the cosmos.| The Marginalian
“We’re still groping for the truth… Science consists of continually making better and better what has been usable in the past.”| The Marginalian
“We ought to give the whole of our attention to the most insignificant and most easily mastered facts, and remain a long time in contemplation of them until we are accustomed to behold the tr…| The Marginalian
“No woman should say, ‘I am but a woman!’ But a woman! What more can you ask to be?”| The Marginalian
“Atomic science began as positive, creative thought.”| The Marginalian
“Who indeed will set bounds to human ingenuity? Who will assert that everything in the universe capable of being perceived is already discovered and known?”| The Marginalian
On what matters and what doesn’t.| The Marginalian
“The universe is humbling. Nature hides many of its most interesting mysteries.”| The Marginalian
A subtle reminder that we are separated from those less fortunate than us by little more than unmerited cosmic odds.| The Marginalian
“Science is a tribute to what we can know although we are fallible… We have to cure ourselves of the itch for absolute knowledge and power.”| The Marginalian
Necessary cognitive fortification against propaganda, pseudoscience, and general falsehood.| The Marginalian
Reverse-engineering one of the greatest minds of all time by his information diet.| The Marginalian
Fine-tuning the machinery of distinguishing the valid from the non-valid.| The Marginalian
“Should is how other people want us to live our lives… Choosing Must is the greatest thing we can do with our lives.”| The Marginalian
“You’re playing the game according to somebody else’s rules, and you can’t win until you understand the rules and step out of that particular game, which is not, after all, worth playing.R…| The Marginalian
“You’ve got to tell the world how to treat you. If the world tells you how you are going to be treated, you are in trouble.”| The Marginalian
“We’ve got to be as clear-headed about human beings as possible, because we are still each other’s only hope.”| The Marginalian
“Life and Reality are not things you can have for yourself unless you accord them to all others.”| The Marginalian
“Work and leisure are complementary parts of the same living process and cannot be separated without destroying the joy of work and the bliss of leisure.”| The Marginalian
“The moral challenge and the grim problem we face is that the life of affluence and pleasure requires exact discipline and high imagination.”| The Marginalian
“The modern version of introspection is the sum total of all those highly individualized choices that we make about the material content of our lives.”| The Marginalian
“The strongest and fieriest emotions of life defy all analytical insight.”| The Marginalian
A playful illustrated primer for every kind of family and every kind of kid.| The Marginalian
“On a cloud I saw a child, and he laughing said to me…”| The Marginalian
“Creative fantasy, because it is mainly trying to do something else (make something new), may open your hoard and let all the locked things fly away like cage-birds.”| The Marginalian
A heartening transaction of literary pleasure.| The Marginalian
Two creative icons at the precipice of mortality.| The Marginalian
“Because love is so enormous, the only thing you can think of doing is swallowing the person that you love entirely.”| The Marginalian
What an American printmaker has to do with Mozart and WWII.| The Marginalian
“I don’t write for children. I write — and somebody says, ‘That’s for children!'”| The Marginalian
“To not have entirely wasted one’s life seems to be a worthy accomplishment, if only for myself.”| The Marginalian
“The exquisite truth and delicacy, both of the humour and the pathos of those stories, I have never seen the like of.”| The Marginalian
How to keep the center solid.| The Marginalian
“You are my idea of a good writer because you have an unmannered style, and when I read what you write, I hear you talking.”| The Marginalian
There is something especially magical about framing these moments of stillness and of absolute attention to the individual amidst this bustling city of millions, a city that never sleeps and never …| The Marginalian
“Serious cat people, like first-rate art critics, are chivvied by passion into perspicacity. Believing is seeing.”| The Marginalian
Mark Twain, Susan Sontag, Simone de Beauvoir, E. B. White, Washington Irving, Anaïs Nin, Italo Calvino, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Joyce Carol Oates, and more| The Marginalian
A celebration of timelessly wonderful reads in an elaborate diorama of papercraft book sculptures.| The Marginalian