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Our utopias tell us more about our lived lives, and their privations, than about our wished-for lives.
Maria Popova • In Praise of Missing Out: Psychoanalyst Adam Phillips on the Paradoxical Value of Our Unlived Lives
Because we are nothing special — on a par with ants and daffodils — it is the work of culture to make us feel special; just as parents need to make their children feel special to help them bear and bear with — and hopefully enjoy — their insignificance in the larger scheme of things. In this sense growing up is always an undoing of what needed to... See more
Maria Popova • In Praise of Missing Out: Psychoanalyst Adam Phillips on the Paradoxical Value of Our Unlived Lives
We are always haunted by the myth of our potential, of what we might have it in ourselves to be or do... We share our lives with the people we have failed to be.... See more
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Our lives become an elegy to needs unmet and desires sacrificed, to possibilities refused, to roads not taken. The myth of our potential can make of our lives a perpetual
Maria Popova • In Praise of Missing Out: Psychoanalyst Adam Phillips on the Paradoxical Value of Our Unlived Lives
The unexamined life is surely worth living, but is the unlived life worth examining? It seems a strange question until one realizes how much of our so-called mental life is about the lives we are not living, the lives we are missing out on, the lives we could be leading but for some reason are not. What we fantasize about, what we long for, are the... See more
Maria Popova • In Praise of Missing Out: Psychoanalyst Adam Phillips on the Paradoxical Value of Our Unlived Lives
We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come.
Maria Popova • How Do We Know What We Want: Milan Kundera on the Central Ambivalences of Life and Love
“Live as if you were living already for the second time,” Viktor Frankl wrote in his 1946 masterwork on the human search for meaning, “and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now!” And yet we only live once, with no rehearsal or reprise — a fact at once so oppressive and so full of possibility that it renders us,... See more
How Do We Know What We Want: Milan Kundera on the Central Ambivalences of Life and Love
We should invert our eyes and practice a sublime astronomy in the infinitude of our heart... If we see the Milky Way, it is because it actually exists in our souls .
Borges’s Mirror of Enigmas: Chance, the Universe, and the Fragile Loveliness of Knowing Who We Are
In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.
Maria Popova • Richard Dawkins on the Luckiness of Death
