“Sometimes it’s not the people who change, it’s the mask that falls off.”
— Haruki Murakami
Tag: Human condition
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
“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
“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
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
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”
Lisa Marie Blair 