Maria Popova Quotes

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.

The longer I live, the more deeply I learn that love — whether we call it friendship or family or romance — is the work of mirroring and magnifying each other’s light.

Throughout life, our habits, beliefs, and ideas evolve beyond recognition. Our physical and social environments change. Almost all of our cells are replaced. Yet we remain, to ourselves, “who” “we” “are.

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.

Language is not the content of thought but the vessel into which we pour the ambivalences and contradictions of our thinking, afloat on the current of time.

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.

those who stand to gain from the manipulation of truth often prey on those bereft of critical thinking.

This is the power of art: The power to transcend our own self-interest, our solipsistic zoom-lens on life, and relate to the world and each other with more integrity, more curiosity, more wholeheartedness.

"Maria Mitchell, ... - having long considered Galileo "not a mere observer and discoverer, but a philosopher," she sees not only the tragedy of his truth but also its triumph: “I knew of no sadder picture in the history of science than that of the old man, Galileo, worn by a long life of scientific research, weak and feeble, trembling before that tribunal whose frown was torture, and declaring that to be false which he knew to be true. And I know of no picture in the history of religion more weakly pitiable than that of the Holy Church trembling before Galileo, and denouncing him because he found in the Book of Nature truths not stated in their own Book of God-forgetting that the Book of Nature is also the Book of God. It seems to be difficult for anyone to take in the idea that two truths cannot conflict."

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.

He is not handsome, but looks as the author of his books should look: a little strange and odd, as if not of this earth.

The richest relationships are often those that don’t fit neatly into the preconceived slots we have made for the archetypes we imagine would populate our lives — the friend, the lover, the parent, the sibling, the mentor, the muse. We meet people who belong to no single slot, who figure into multiple categories at different times and in different magnitudes. We then must either stretch ourselves to create new slots shaped after these singular relationships, enduring the growing pains of self-expansion, or petrify.

Unlike critical thinking, that pillar of reason and necessary counterpart to hope, [cynicism] is inherently uncreative, unconstructive, and spiritually corrosive.

It takes rare courage to recognize that feelings are the most perishable of our possessions, even more so than opinions, for an opinion — that is, a real opinion, which is qualitatively different than a fleeting impression or a borrowed stance — is arrived at via a well-reasoned argument with oneself. Not so a feeling — feelings coalesce out of the vapors that escape from the deepest groundwaters of our unreasoned and unreasonable being, and whatever rainbows they may scatter for a moment when touched with the light of another, they diffuse and evaporate just as readily, just as mysteriously.
Love, Margaret implies in her letter to Sam, is never to be taken for granted — it is to be met moment by moment, on its ever-changing terms.

Those accustomed to hard work and self-propulsion, who have risen to the zenith of accomplishment by force of will and magnitude of effort, are most susceptible to the supreme self-damnation of human life — the belief that love is something to be earned by striving rather than something that comes unbidden like a shepherd's song on a summer evening in the mountains of Bulgaria.