Maria Popova Quotes

"What solidity of sentiment it takes not to let an awareness of the moment's impermanence dilute its richness, its sweetness, but purify it and saturate it with the utmost "fullness of being.

Unlike the prose of letters, pinned to the physical and emotional reality of the present, in poetry the imagination is allowed to travel between fact and fantasy, to traverse present, past, and future, so that the reader, and perhaps even the writer, is never quite sure — nor need ever ask — to what extent the images evoked correspond to the intersection of matter and moment we call reality.

I was learning about it along the way, often through reading, often from people and ideas marginalized by culture, erased by the collective selective memory we call history

I will die, you will die the atoms that huddled for a cosmic blink around a shadow of a self will return to the seas that made us. What will survive of us are shores seeds and stardust.

Greatness is consistency driven by a deep love of the work.

We know from the now-iconic 1970s Good Samaritan study that the single greatest predictor of uncaring, unkind, and uncompassionate behavior, even among people who have devoted their lives to the welfare of others, is a perceived lack of time — a feeling of being rushed. The sense of urgency seems to consume all of our other concerns — it is the razor’s blade that severs our connection to anything outside ourselves, anything beyond the task at hand, and turns our laser-sharp focus of concern onto the the immediacy of the self alone.

Some loves lodge themselves in the tissue of being like mercury, pervading every synapse and sinew to remain there, sometimes dormant, sometimes tortuously restive, with a half-life that exceeds a lifetime.

There is no overstating the triumph of having remained motivated by beauty in taking down the ugliest malignancies of human nature’s grasp for power.

Poetry opens these back doors of consciousness, giving us access to our own experience, particularly to regions we can't quite name or comprehend with the analytical mind.

We suffer by wanting different things often at odds with one another, but we suffer even more by wanting to want different things.

The cult of productivity has its place, but worshipping at its altar daily robs us of the very capacity for joy and wonder that makes life worth living.

Decrying the sublimation of women’s minds to domesticity, Fuller asserts that “a house is no home unless it contain food and fire for the mind as well as for the body” and admonishes that “human beings are not so constituted that they can live without expansion.

Perhaps, after all, we aren't divided so much into mind and body as into mind and mind. And few forces can propel humanity forward more reliably than the cleaving together of kindred minds in solidarity to a shared truth.

Above all, Somerville possessed the defining mark of the great scientist and the great human being — the ability to hold one’s opinions with firm but unfisted fingers, remaining receptive to novel theories and willing to change one’s mind in light of new evidence.

The lazy hand grenade of “spinster” had been thrown and would be thrown at Carson many times, having been clenched in the unevolved fist of culture for more than a century since the landmark Woman’s Rights Convention was derided as comprising “old maids, whose personal charms were never very attractive.