Maria Popova Quotes

Boredom is not only an adaptive emotion but a vital one with its related faculties of contemplation, solitude, and stillness. It is essential for the life of the mind and the life of the spirit.

Beauty magnetizes curiosity and wonder, beckoning us to discover — in the literal sense, to uncover and unconceal — what lies beneath the surface of the human label. What we recognize as beauty may be a language for encoding truth, a memetic mechanism for transmitting it, as native to the universe as mathematics — the one perceived by the optical eye, the other by the mind's eye.

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 are infinitely many kinds of beautiful lives

But interpretation invariably reveals more about the interpreter than about the interpreted. 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.

Some of our dormant multitudes come awake with a catlike stretch, slowly and lazily over years of personal development. Others leap into being with the jolt of an alarm sounded by a particular event or person who has entered our lives at a particular moment — rarely anticipated, almost never convenient, always transformational. On those rare, momentous mornings, one looks into the bathroom mirror and greets — sometimes grudgingly, sometimes gleefully — the gladsome stranger of oneself.

Behind each door of what-if lies an unanswerable question that unhinges an infinite Rube Goldberg machine of probabilities. The life we have is the only one we will ever know, and even that with tenuous certainty.

Ambition is disfigured into arrogance when it becomes unmoored from self-awareness, from a realistic assessment of one's competences.

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.

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.

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.

However divided we may feel within ourselves, it is the sum total of our warring fractions that make us who we are — fragmentary but indivisible.

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.

We go through life seeing reality not as it really is, in its unfathomable depths of complexity and contradiction, but as we hope or fear or expect it to be. Too often, we confuse certainty for truth and the strength of our beliefs for the strength of the evidence. When we collide with the unexpected, with the antipode to our hopes, we are plunged into bewildered despair. We rise from the pit only by love. Perhaps Keats had it slightly wrong — perhaps truth is love and love is truth.

We still talk in terms of conquest. We still haven’t become mature enough to think of ourselves as only a very tiny part of a vast and incredible universe….We’re challenged, as mankind has never been challenged before, to prove our maturity and our mastery — not of nature, but of ourselves.