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On Kindness

  • Book
  • 2009
  • #SocialInteraction
Adam Phillips
@AdamPhillips
(Author)
Barbara Taylor
@BarbaraTaylor
(Author)
www.goodreads.com
Hardcover
4.2/5 86 ratings
Hardcover Kindle
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3.53/5 412 ratings
1 Recommender
1 Mention
Kindness is the foundation of the world’s great religions and most-enduring philosophies. Why, then, does being kind feel so dangerous? If we crave kindness with such intensity, why... Show More

Kindness is the foundation of the world’s great religions and most-enduring philosophies. Why, then, does being kind feel so dangerous? If we crave kindness with such intensity, why is it a pleasure we often deny ourselves? And why—despite our longing—are we often suspicious when we are on the receiving end of it?

In this brilliant book, the eminent psychoanalyst Adam Phillips and the historian Barbara Taylor examine the pleasures and perils of kindness. Modern people have been taught to perceive ourselves as fundamentally antagonistic to one another, our motives self-seeking. Drawing on intellectual history, literature, psychoanalysis, and contemporary social theory, this book explains how and why we have chosen loneliness over connection. On Kindness argues that a life lived in instinctive, sympathetic identification with others is the one we should allow ourselves to live.

Bursting with often shocking insight, this brief and essential book will return to its readers what Marcus Aurelius declared was mankind’s “greatest delight”: the intense satisfactions of generosity and compassion.

(From Goodreads)

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Number of Pages: 128

ISBN: 0374226504

ISBN-13: 9780374226503

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Maria Popova @MariaPopova · Dec 3, 2022
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“We are never as kind as we want to be, but nothing outrages us more than people being unkind to us.” Superb read
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