Maria Popova Quotes

It is one of the ironies of our time that, while concentrating on the defense of our country against enemies from without, we should be so heedless of those who would destroy it from within.

Can any author ever imagine just how far literature reaches into unfathomed horizons of culture, what it transforms and whom it liberates?

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.

We can no more claim all credit for our achievement than deflect all blame for our impediments.

To be a revolutionary is to be in possession of an imagination capable of leaping across the frontier of the familiar to envision a new order in which what is gained eclipses the ill-serving comforts of what is lost.

The real wealth of the Nation lies in the resources of the earth — soil, water, forests, minerals, and wildlife. To utilize them for present needs while insuring their preservation for future generations requires a delicately balanced and continuing program, based on the most extensive research. Their administration is not properly, and cannot be, a matter of politics.

Meanwhile, someplace in the world, somebody is making love and another a poem. Elsewhere in the universe, a star manyfold the mass of our third-rate sun is living out its final moments in a wild spin before collapsing into a black hole, its exhale bending spacetime itself into a well of nothingness that can swallow every atom that ever touched us and every datum we ever produced, every poem and statue and symphony we’ve ever known — an entropic spectacle insentient to questions of blame and mercy, devoid of why.
“In four billion years, our own star will follow its fate, collapsing into a white dwarf. We exist only by chance, after all. The Voyager will still be sailing into the interstellar shorelessness on the wings of the “heavenly breezes” Kepler had once imagined, carrying Beethoven on a golden disc crafted by a symphonic civilization that long ago made love and war and mathematics on a distant blue dot.
But until that day comes, nothing once created ever fully leaves us. Seeds are planted and come abloom generations, centuries, civilizations later, migrating across coteries and countries and continents. Meanwhile, people live and people die — in peace as war rages on, in poverty and disrepute as latent fame awaits, with much that never meets its more, in shipwrecked love.
I will die.
You will die.
The atoms that huddled for a cosmic blink around the shadow of a self will return to the seas that made us.
What will survive of us are shoreless seeds and stardust.

Literature is the original Internet – every footnote, every citation, every allusion is essentially a hyperlink to another text, to another mind.

"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.

Life is infinitely more interesting when considered for the questions it raises rather than for the answers it bestows.

What is love, after all, if not an affectionate acceptance of the lover's full spectrum of being, the silly along with the solemn?

We are who we are in large part because of where we are and when we are. But lives of courage and consequence remap the locus of spirit and possibility for generations to come.

Nobody was talking about this moral dimension of science. Nobody was placing a hand on humanity’s shoulder and turning us away from this destructive hubris, shaking us into awareness, into humility, into wakefulness to the fragility of a miraculous world that flourished long before we trampled it with our arrogant footsteps and should continue to flourish long after we have gone.

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.

What invigorated Maria Mitchell that evening, and what would drive her for the remaining decades of her life, was not the king’s medal, nor the luster of worldwide recognition, but the sheer thrill of discovery — the ecstasy of having personally chipped a small fragment of knowledge from the immense
monolith of the unknown, that elemental motive force of every sincere scientist.