Maria Popova Quotes

Nobody knows what goes on between two hearts including, more often than not, the people in whose chests they beat.

The gap between intention and interpretation is always rife with wrongs, especially when writer and reader occupy vastly different strata of emotional maturity and intellectual sophistication.

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.

One of the saddest tendencies in our present culture is an indignant intolerance for the basic humanity of being human. People of the past are harshly judged by the standards of the present (which their own difficult lives helped establish), and people of the present are harshly judged by impossible (and hypocritical, in the full context of any judger’s life) standards of uniform perfection across all regions of private and public existence. And yet the eternal test of character — our great moral triumph — is the ability to face our own imperfections with composure, reflecting on them with lucid and luminous determination to do better — an essential form of moral courage all the more difficult, and all the more important, amid a cultural atmosphere that mistakes self-righteousness for morality and suffocates the basic impulse toward betterment with punitive intolerance for human foible.

Maria Popova : “Resolutions for a Life Worth Living

In science as in romance, the unknown is disrobed sheath by sheath as fervid fantasies imagine the possibilities conquerable by knowledge — fantasies that far outstrip the reality eventually revealed as knowledge progresses.

There are infinitely many kinds of beautiful lives

... the most significant event of her intellectual and emotional development arrived the way most transformative things enter out lives — through the back door of the mansion of our plans.

"What makes a person "the same" person across life's tectonic upheavals of circumstance and character? Amid the chaos and decay toward which the universe inclines, we grasp for stability and permanence by trying to carve out a solid sense of self in our blink of existence. But there is no solidity. Every quark of every atom of every cell in your body had been replaced since the time of your first conscious memory, your first word, your first kiss. In the act of living, you come to dream different dreams, value different values, love different loves. In a sense, you are reborn with each new experience."

Language tells thought how to move and thought tells language how to bend.

I don't believe in epiphany. I believe in incremental revelation.

Every voracious reader knows that there is no Dewey system for the Babel of the mind. You walk amid the labyrinthine stacks and ideas leap at you like dust bunnies drawn from the motes that cover a great many different books ready long ago.

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

We navigate the unknown frontiers of the social universe through a sextant of existing relationships — nearly every new person we meet is within only a few degrees of separation from someone we already know. But every once in a while, pure chance intercedes to remind us that whatever structures of control we may put into place, however much we may mistake the illusion of choice for the fact of choice, randomness is the reigning monarch of the universe.

My own sense is that one aided the other, as those who stand to gain from the manipulation of truth often prey on those bereft of critical thinking.

I think the history of our species is mistaking the limits of the known for the limits of the knowable.