Maria Popova Quotes

I don't subscribe to the tortured genius myth. I don't think it's necessary to suffer in order to create. But I do think that 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.

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

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

I've written almost everything on foot and then what I do at the keyboard is transcription.

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

To live wonder-smitten with reality is the gladdest way to live.

I would almost dare to say that the sickness is perhaps a very real and very dreadful hatred of life as such, of course subconscious, buried under our pitiful and superficial optimism about ourselves and our affluent society. But I think that the very thought processes of materialistic affluence (and here the same things are found in all the different economic systems that seek affluence for its own sake) are ultimately self-defeating. They contain so many built-in frustrations that they inevitably lead us to despair in the midst of “plenty” and “happiness” and the awful fruit of this despair is indiscriminate, irresponsible destructiveness, hatred of life, carried on in the name of life itself. In order to “survive” we instinctively destroy that on which our survival depends….Technics and wisdom are not by any means opposed. On the contrary, the duty of our age, the “vocation” of modern man is to unite them in a supreme humility which will result in a totally self-forgetful creativity and service.

Bernstein quoted from a speech Kennedy would have delivered a few hours before the assassination: “America’s leadership must be guided by learning and reason.” The loss he said, was only deepened by the awareness that it had been the product of the exact antipodes of learning and reason — “ignorance and hatred.” … “Learning and Reason: those two words of John Kennedy’s were not uttered in time to save his own life; but every man can pick them up where they fell, and make them part of himself, the seed of that rational intelligence without which our world can no longer survive. This must be the mission of every man of goodwill: to insist, unflaggingly, at risk of becoming a repetitive bore, but to insist on the achievement of a world in which the mind will have triumphed over violence.

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.

we are animated by an intense connection to the landscapes and topographies of our formative years. An emotion known as topophilia, which I experienced while revisiting those mountain trails of my childhood, furnishes this affective-spatial memory that renders childhood as much a time as a place.

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.

Strive to be uncynical, to be a hope-giving person, to be a steward of substance. Choose to lift people up, not to lower them down because it is a choice always, and because in doing so you lift yourself up.

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

The children of the sun, happy people whose eyes shone with a bright radiance and whose faces gleamed with wisdom, and with a certain consciousness, consummated in tranquility.”
(paraphrasing Dostoyevsky, from Notes from the Underground).

The lazy hand grenade of “spinster” had been thrown and would be thrown at Carson many times, having been clenched in the unevolved fist of culture for more than a century since the landmark Woman’s Rights Convention was derided as comprising “old maids, whose personal charms were never very attractive.