Maria Popova Quotes

"Are we to despair or rejoice over the fact that even the greatest loves exist only "for a time"? The time scales are elastic, contracting and expanding with the depth and magnitude of each love, but they are always finite — like books, like lives, like the universe itself. The triumph of love is in the courage and integrity with which we inhabit the transcendent transience that binds two people for the time it binds them, before letting go with equal courage and integrity."

What are the building blocks of character, of contentment, of lasting achievement? How does a person come into self-possession and sovereignty of mind against the tide of convention and unreasoning collectivism? Does genius suffice for happiness, does distinction, does love? Two Nobel Prizes don’t seem to recompense the melancholy radiating from every photograph of the woman in the black laboratory dress. Is success a guarantee of fulfillment, or merely a promise as precarious as a marital vow? How, in this blink of existence bookended by nothingness, do we attain completeness of being?

"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."

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.

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.

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

If you don't have the patience to read something, don't have the hubris to comment on it.

If it is worthy — the book, as the love — and if we are lucky, it reflects us back to ourselves magnified yet transformed

Like any currency of value, the human imagination is a coin with two inseparable sides. It is our faculty of fancy that fills the disquieting gaps of the unknown with the tranquilizing certitudes of myth and superstition, that points to magic and witchcraft when common sense and reason fail to unveil causality. But that selfsame faculty is also what leads us to rise above accepted facts, above the limits of the possible established by custom and convention, and reach for new summits on the degree of courage, determined by some incalculable combination of nature, culture, and character.

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.

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.

If you're not a little embarrassed of who you were and how you lived, perhaps the process of growth isn't quite working.

I started writing to figure out how to live, and I still do it for the same reason 20 years later.

What makes a diary so wonderful is that it's a record of how someone pays attention.

Out of what we have suffered and do suffer comes that restlessness

to find meaning
to find beauty
to find wonder

to give voice and shape to what we feel