Lisa Marie Blair

Tag: Human condition

  • The Mask

    “Sometimes it’s not the people who change, it’s the mask that falls off.”

    — Haruki Murakami

  • A Stranger to Oneself

    “The truth, forever, for everybody, is that one is a stranger to oneself, and that one must deal with this stranger day in and day out—that one, in fact, is forced to create, as distinct from invent, oneself.”

    — James Baldwin

  • The Other Side of Silence

    “If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heartbeat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.”

    ― George Eliot, Middlemarch

  • A Thin Veneer of Civilization

    NPR // Throughline // When Things Fall Apart

    “What we assume in other people is what we get out of them. Our view of human nature tends to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. If we assume that people are fundamentally selfish, then that’s how they will behave. If we assume that people are fundamentally decent, then maybe we can create a very different kind of society.”

  • The Logic of Rage

    The Logic of Rage // Hidden Brain

    “Most of the time, we are well-served by being logical and deliberate. But on rare occasions, it’s helpful to act with unthinking haste. The operative word here is rare.”

  • Deeply Human Hate

    Why do we hate one another – and how can we stop?

    How and when does conflict metastasize into hatred? Dessa picks apart the science of hostility, with help from a criminologist who identifies the tipping point between prejudice and hate, and an Israeli psychologist who’s studied one of the longest conflicts in the world today.

  • Common Universal Needs

    A list of common universal needs via “The Art of Not Taking Things Personally“

  • All Human Behavior

    “The way of the miracle-worker is to see all human behavior as one two things: either love, or a call for love”

    — Marianne Williamson

  • Runaway Self-Hatred

    “A degree of regret may sometimes be helpful: it can help us to take stock of errors and avoid the worst of the pitfalls next time. But runaway self-hatred serves no useful purpose whatsoever; it is, in its masochistic way, an indulgence we can’t afford.

    We may be foolish, but this doesn’t single us out as particularly awful or unusual, it only confirms that we belong to the human race, a fact for which we deserve limitless sympathy and compassion.”

  • So-Called Religions

    A religion may be discerned in capitalism—that is to say, capitalism serves essentially to allay the same anxieties, torments, and disturbances to which the so-called religions offered answers.”

    — Walter Benjamin, “Capitalism as Religion” 

  • Continue to Live

    Mental Illness and Reasons to Live // The School of Life

    “If there is any advantage to going through a mental crisis of the worst kind, it is that – on the other side of it – we will have ended up choosing life rather than merely assuming it to be the unremarkable norm. We, the ones who have crawled back from the darkness, may be disadvantaged in a hundred ways, but at least we will have had to find, rather than assumed or inherited, some reasons why we are here. Every day we continue will be a day earned back from death and our satisfactions will be all the more more intense and our gratitude more profound for having been consciously arrived at.”

  • Honor it All

    “Now when I recite the word namaste, I think about it in this way: the light in me honors the light in you, AND the dark in me honors the dark in you; the pain, suffering, beauty, and brilliance in me sees the pain, suffering, beauty, and brilliance in you. All of it, everything. Not just the light, love, truth, beauty, and peace, but also the dark, madness, confusion, and chaos. I want to honor it all because all of it deserves to be honored. We, each of us, contain it all.”

    — Sasha Tozzi, What I mean when I say the word “NAMASTE”

  • Society

    Still, it rarely happens that men live according to the guidance of reason. Instead, their lives are so constituted that they are usually envious and burdensome to one another. They can hardly, however, live a solitary life; hence, that definition which makes man a social animal has been quite pleasing to most. And surely we do derive, from society of our fellow men, many more advantages than disadvantages.”

    — Benedict de Spinoza, Ethics

  • Sad and Noble Truth

    “[The crucifix] stood there, crowning the rock, as it still stands on so many highway sides, vainly preaching to passers-by, an emblem of sad and noble truths: that pleasure is not an end, but an accident; that pain is the choice of the magnanimous; that it is best to suffer all things and do well.”

    — Robert Louis Stevenson, Olalla