Maria Popova exploring literature, philosophy, art, and the search for meaning.
"Everything depends on the individual human being, regardless of how small a number of like-minded people there is... on each person... creatively making the meaning of life a reality in his or her own being."
"A passion, like the torrent in the violence of its course, might perhaps too, like the torrent, leave ruin and desolation behind... My love for you... is deep and calm, more like the quiet river, which refreshes and beautifies where it flows."
“When we have learned how to listen to trees,” Hermann Hesse wrote in one of his least known, most beautiful essays, “then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen…
"Often the places we grow up in... influence how we perceive and conceptualize the world, give us metaphors to live by, and shape the purpose that drives us."
Climbing the Andes one windy January afternoon, watching peak after peek emerge on the horizon like giant mounds of moss, I found myself wondering about the clear line toward the top where the green ends and the reddish-brown of the barren rock begins, wonderi…
It could have been otherwise. That one defiant particle of matter could have never broken free from the equipoise of antimatter to sound the first note of something out of the mute nothingness, singing a universe into being. The universe could have withheld gr…
“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…
“Whatever has happened, whatever is going to happen in the world, it is the living moment that contains the sum of the excitement, this moment in which we touch life and all the energy of the past and future,” Muriel Rukeyser wrote in one of the greatest books…
“Time is a river that sweeps me along, but I am a river,” Borges wrote. “Time is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire.” Most of us are not Borges. Most of us are drowning in bewilderment at where the time goes, burning with the urgency of being alive whi…
Bigger than Manhattan, Earth’s largest living organism sways in the surf south of Australia: Posidonia australis — a species of seagrass that, unable to flower, clones itself. Older than mathematics and the written word, it has been cloning itself since before…
“We are bathing in mystery and confusion… That will always be our destiny. The universe will always be much richer than our ability to understand it.”
To love is to sign a contract with loss. To love anyway is both the great tragedy and the great triumph of life. When two people have loved one another, each has become embedded in the marrow of the other’s being and both have had a profound experience that ca…
This essay is adapted from the nineteenth chapter of my book Figuring. In the first autumn of her thirties, Emily Dickinson wrote to her confidante and eventual editor Thomas Wentworth Higginson: I had a terror — since September — I could tell to none, and so…
"Wander where you will over all the world, from every valley seeing forever new hills calling you to climb them, from every mountain top farther peaks enticing you... until you stand one day on the last peak on the border of the interminable sea, stopped by th…
"There is no greatness without a little stubbornness... Works of art are not born in flashes of inspiration but in a daily fidelity."
“Humor, more than anything else in the human make-up, can afford an aloofness and an ability to rise above any situation, even if only for a few seconds,” Viktor Frankl wrote in recalling the role of humor as a lifeline to sanity and survival in the Holocaust.…
Several years ago, rummaging through the archives of the Academy of American Poets, I came upon a box labeled “Ballots 1950” — the record of the secret vote by the chancellors the year the Academy’s prestigious fellowship was awarded to E.E. Cummings, catapult…
Our lives are defined not by what we have but what we give — on what and whom we spend our energy and time, how we share our material possessions and our mental powers, what we do with our gifts. “Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to…
How to become an "antischolar" in a culture that treats knowledge as "an ornament that allows us to rise in the pecking order."
“They do not sweat and whine about their condition,” Walt Whitman wrote of the other animals, “they do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins, they do not make me sick discussing their duty to God, not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with t…
"We must live it, now, a day at a time and be very careful not to hurt each other."
"Oh comforting solitude, how favorable thou art to original thought!"
"Ultimately, we are puppets of both pain and pleasure, occasionally made free by our creativity."
"The mind narrates what the nervous system knows. Story follows state."
"Make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life."
In 1824, studying a set of large fossil bones discovered in a quarry near Oxford two centuries earlier, the English theologian, geologist, and paleontologist William Buckland kept looking at the fragment of the lower jaw. Something didn’t add up. As he examine…
A hymn of rage, a hymn of redemption, and a timeless love letter to the possible.
"There is no place more intimate than the spirit alone."
Children know the deepest truths about life, the elemental knowledge we unlearn in the act of living, those inarticulable truths music alone helps us remember. To hear children sing the secret wisdom of the heart is to be in the presence of something truer and…
"In a world whose absurdity appears to be so impenetrable, we simply must reach a greater degree of understanding among men, a greater sincerity."