Maria Popova exploring literature, philosophy, art, and the search for meaning.
“If the doors of perception were cleansed,” William Blake wrote, “everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.” But we are finite creatures, in time and in space, and there is a limit to how much reality we can bear — evolution gave us consciousness so t…
Suppose we agree that we are here to love anyway — to love even though the work is almost unbearably difficult, even though we know that everything alive is dying, that everything beautiful is perishable, that everything we love will eventually be taken from u…
It is in relationships that we discover both our depths and our limits, there that we anneal ourselves and transcend ourselves, there that we are hurt the most and there that we find the most healing. But despite what a crucible of our emotional and spiritual…
"It wouldn't have been failure to be bankrupt, dishonoured, pilloried, hanged; it was failure not to be anything."
A roadmap to the fulfilled belonging on the other side of "the great aloneness which knows not what is far and what is near, nor what is small nor great."
In late 1884, Adelaide Boodle — talented, timorous, still in her twenties — received news so thrilling she thought she was dreaming: Her favorite author was moving into the small town on the south coast of England that had always been her home. Having longed t…
"In a world whose absurdity appears to be so impenetrable, we simply must reach a greater degree of understanding among men, a greater sincerity."
“I love her happiness more than my own.”
"Sometimes as an antidote to fear of death, I eat the stars."
The question of what it takes to create — to make something of beauty and substance that touches other lives across space and time — is one of the deepest, oldest questions, perhaps because the answer to it is so unbearably simple: everything. We bring everyth…
"In old age we should wish still to have passions strong enough to prevent us turning in on ourselves."
Recovering the "forgotten blaze or burst of astonishment at our own existence" alive in the back of our modernity-deadened minds.
“Let me not seem to have lived in vain,” the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe whispered on his deathbed, not realizing that the astronomical tables he was leaving behind would become the portal through which Kepler arrives at the laws of planetary motion; not rea…
"Who is good if he knows not who he is? and who knows what he is, if he forgets that things which have been made are perishable, and that it is not possible for one human being to be with another always?"
"In a world full of people who seem to know everything, passionately, based on little (often slanted) information, where certainty is often mistaken for power, what a relief it is to be in the company of someone confident enough to stay unsure (that is, perpet…
One of the most important things I have learned about living is that, in any life of purpose and creative vitality, you must be as religious and disciplined about your sleep as about your work. And yet one of the great self-betrayals of our culture is the way…
Like consciousness, like music, like love, life itself didn’t have to exist — nothing in the fundamental laws demands it. The universe could have gone on lapping at itself as a horizonless sea of pure spacetime, black and lifeless as the inside of a skull. But…
"You are this body, and you are these molecules, and you are these atoms, and you are these quantum entities, and you are the quantum foam, and you are the energetic field of space-time, and, ultimately, you are the fundamental awareness out of which all these…
"Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire."
When I was a child, little delighted me more than the magical green garlands draping from the pine trees, which I made into wreaths and mustaches to roam the mountains of Bulgaria as a miniature Orlando. I had no idea that Usnea longissima is just one of more…
Just as there are transitional times in the life of the world — dark periods of disorientation between two world systems, periods in which humanity loses the ability to comprehend itself and collapses into chaos in order to rebuild itself around a new organizi…
"To love without knowing how to love wounds the person we love."
"I have got to make everything that has happened to me good for me... There is not a single degradation of the body which I must not try and make into a spiritualising of the soul."
"Whatever returns from oblivion returns to find a voice."
"What happened could have happened to anyone, but not everyone could have carried on."
Few things in our culture are more wounding than the concept of healing — as if the pains and losses that we suffer are an illness, a malfunction of the psyche to be cut out like a tumor, rather than a natural function of being alive, of feeling life deeply an…
"Our neurons must be used ... not only to know but also to transform knowledge; not only to experience but also to construct."
"When you love someone, the best thing you can offer that person is your presence."
“To be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight,” E. E. Cummings wrote in his timeless summons for the courage to be yourself. But wh…
"We want to believe that love is singular and exclusive, and it unnerves us to think that it might actually be renewable..."