Psychology

Besides carefree days, Christmas carols and traditional sweet breads, any respectable December also includes an evaluation of the achievements of the previous year and making plans for the future.

Our dreams must be stronger than the unfortunate circumstances in which we find ourselves.

The American Economic Review recently published the results of the largest randomized study ever conducted to measure the impact on the quality of life that deactivation ones Facebook account might have.

Can the thinking of a single philosopher be so influential as to change the fundamental values ​​of a society and lead to tremors of transcontinental proportions, like the economic crisis that began in 2007? Could Ayn Rand's philosophy be the almost-imperceptible reason for transforming the United States, as Levine puts it, into a "selfish nation"?

Courage is a special virtue: unlike other virtues that can be formed and polished over time, courage only makes itself known spontaneously and fully in situations where one is required to act, proving its existence.

It has been more than ten years since my first job interview ended with the classic: You did a great job, but we have chosen someone else. Since this memorable moment, other closed doors have followed: employers rejecting my application, people not sharing my interests, groups giving me the feeling of not being accepted.

Paul was imprisoned by the Roman Emperor. He was on Death Row. Every morning, when he opened his eyes, he didn’t know if this day would be his last, and whether he would be thrown to the lions or burned.

When it was close, when I first saw its truly hideous face, I realised that I would never get used to it. And, no matter how hard I tried, no matter how much hope I tried to gather, I found nothing bright or inspiring about death. I know I will never find such a brightness, because it doesn't exist. But I saw the...

One night while checking on his patients in a palliative care centre, the therapist risked asking a confusing question to a person whose universe had shrunk to the size of his sickbed: “What brought you joy today?” The answer was immediate: “Being alive.”

I spoke very little in my early years and my mother says that my silence scared her. She never knew what was going through my mind. She was afraid I was hiding something.

A man is about as big as the things that make him angry – Winston Churchill

Things happen anyway, whether good or bad. Why put extra effort into trying to respond positively when certain things happen? Why be grateful?

"There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens" (Ecclesiastes 3:1).

When life takes a bad turn, we are often tempted to console ourselves with nostalgia. We begin to look at the past in a different light. We realise that we had been too demanding of ourselves, of others, of the world. That even though we had everything we needed we still wanted more. That we were always looking for something else, without paying...

As a teenager, I remember pasting a quote from Blaise Pascal on the wall of my room. It was a thought I resonated with, not without some arrogance: "All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone."