Maria Popova exploring literature, philosophy, art, and the search for meaning.
Toni Morrison once lamented that people have been taught to think of a book as a mirror, when it ought to be a door. All great storytelling — be it a novel or a poem, a film or a song — enchants us precisely because it swings open the door to a world distinctl…
One of the commonest and most corrosive human reflexes is to react to helplessness with anger. We do it in our personal lives and we do it in our political lives. We are living through a time of uncommon helplessness and uncertainty, touching every aspect of o…
At the hazy dawn of the twentieth century, through the byways of mental meandering and mathematical play, Albert Einstein arrived at a revelation about the nature of the universe while working as a clerk at the Swiss patent office — a new relationship between…
To be a true person is to be entirely oneself in every circumstance, with all the courage and vulnerability this requires. And yet because a person is a confederacy of parts often at odds and sometimes at war with each other, being true is not a pledge to be a…
"We only need to be as true to others as we are to ourselves that there may be ground enough for friendship."
Few things in life are more devastating than to give something your all and still fail. Not the “fail better” of startup culture, not the “fail forward” of self-help, not the failure that is childhood’s fulcrum of learning, not the inspired mistakes that prope…
It may be that consciousness evolved to sieve the relevant from the incomprehensible allness of all there is, to parse the world into concepts and find an organizing principle for the chaos of them. Our cognitive inheritance is a restless yearning to fathom ho…
"In broaching the possibility of being, in some way, against self-criticism, we have to imagine a world in which celebration is less suspect than criticism."
"Who we are and who we become depends, in part, on whom we love."
This essay is adapted from Traversal and continues the story of the making of Leaves of Grass. With Leaves of Grass already printed — by a Brooklyn friend, at the poet’s own expense — Whitman had only to find a willing distributor who would root this uncommon…
"You are born alone. You die alone. The value of the space in between is trust and love."
"Come with me. I'll teach you the flowers and the stars."
"If you would learn the secrets of Nature, you must practice more humanity than others."
"If you are now wondering where to look for consolation, where to seek a new and better God... he does not come to us from books, he lives within us... This God is in you too. He is most particularly in you, the dejected and despairing."
"In a world whose absurdity appears to be so impenetrable, we simply must reach a greater degree of understanding among men, a greater sincerity."
The summer I turned forty, my maternal grandmother, then ninety, gave me an astonishing embroidery she had completed it when she was my age after, having worked on it for years. The cascading geometries of blue, black, and white, interlocking extraordinary pre…
"Memory is dialogic and arises not only from direct experience but from the intercourse of many minds."
Every night, for every human being that ever was and ever will be, the Moon rises to remind us how improbably lucky we are, each of its craters a monument of the odds we prevailed against to exist, a reliquary of the violent collisions that forged our rocky pl…
One of my earliest and most vivid childhood memories is of swimming in a cool pool bounded by boulders in the middle of a river in the mountains of Bulgaria, the late-afternoon sun casting komorebi on the water through the rustling leaves. I can still hear the…
The most assuring thing about life is that we can change, that things can change, that they are always changing. The most maddening is that despite living in a universe that is one constant transmutation of energy and matter, despite living in bodies and minds…
"Everything impinges on everything else... Everything is potentially everywhere."
“We can never go back,” bell hooks wrote in her moving reckoning with love. “We can go forward. We can find the love our hearts long for, but not until we let go grief about the love we lost long ago.” And yet we do go back, over and over. The tragic flaw of o…
“Let us love this distance which is wholly woven of friendship, for those who do not love each other are not separated,” Simone Weil wrote in her soulful meditation on the paradox of closeness and separation. To be separated from a loved one — in space or in s…
The great myth is that truth is an emergent property of fact, that it bubbles up from the bottom of reality once the mind attains enough fathoms of factuality. But objective reality — all those things like gravity and light and the fossil of the Archaeopteryx…
"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... We live everything as it comes, without warning."
"All your sorrows have been wasted on you if you have not yet learned how to be wretched."
A recent visit to Teotihuacán — the ancient Mesoamerican city in present-day Mexico, built by earlier cultures around 600 BCE and later rediscovered by the Aztecs — left me wonder-smitten by the see-saw of our search for truth and our search for meaning, by a…
Fifteen years into reading and writing in order to learn how to live, I looked back on these marginalia on the search for meaning and realized that the people whose lives and work have most moved me and fed me, consoled me and inspirited me, were people who ex…
"Old friends cannot be created out of hand. Nothing can match the treasure of common memories, of trials endured together, of quarrels and reconciliations and generous emotions."
How a confused romancer that survived the Ice Age became a tropical sensation and took over the world.