themarginalian.org

“To be a Flower is profound Responsibility, ” Emily Dickinson wrote. From the moment she pressed the first wildflower into her astonishing teenage…

"Understanding and loving are inseparable. If they are separate, it is a cerebral process and the door to essential understanding remains closed. "

"You may have to break your heart, but it isn’t nothing to know even one moment alive. "

"The essential cultural discrimination is not between having and not having or haves and have-nots, but between the superfluous and the indispensable. Wisdom.…

The only thing more dangerous than wanting to save another person — a dangerous desire too often mistaken for love — is wanting to save yourself, t…

"We can change, evolve, and transform our own conditioning. We can choose to move like water rather than be molded like clay. "

"Can you plant a garden to stop a war? It depends how you think about time. It depends what you think a seed does, if it’s tossed into fertile soil. "

"Often the places we grow up in. .. influence how we perceive and conceptualize the world, give us metaphors to live by, and shape the purpose that drives us. "

"Here lies the paradox of solitude. Look long and hard enough at yourself in isolation and suddenly you will see the rest of humanity staring back. "

When I was a child, little delighted me more than the magical green garlands draping from the pine trees, which I made into wreaths and mustaches to roam the m…

"Human being, vegetables or cosmic dust, we all dance to an invisible tune, intoned in the distance by a mysterious player. "

"It may be that in REM, this gloaming between waking consciousness and the unconscious, we practice the possible into the real. .. It may be that we evolved to…

“There is no description of a life without an account of the changes that are possible within it, ” Adam Philips writes in his superb meditation on our ambival…

Walking through the white-walled gallery at the graduation show of one of New York’s most esteemed art schools, between beautiful young people with Insta…

"Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fi…

“Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy, ” Albert Camus wrote in one of the mos…

Long before he became the world’s most beloved neurologist, Oliver Sacks was a twenty-seven-year-old medical resident on his first hospital post when an…