Maria Popova Quotes

For only as truth is substituted for the shadows of doubt and fear and distrust that now impel man to turn against himself — only as truth is discovered and expressed — can we be truly free.

Medals are small things in the light of the stars,” she would later write. “There’s only one thing in the world of any real importance, and that is goodness.

To live in a world without forgiveness, she intimates, is to make of life an instant fossil record

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.

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.

Once a poem is made available to the public, the right of interpretation belongs to the reader,

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.

In the ancient Greek allegory, Theseus — the founder-king of Athens — sailed triumphantly back to the great city after slaying the mythic Minotaur on Crete. For a thousand years, his ship was maintained in the harbor of Athens as a living trophy and was sailed to Crete annually to reenact the victorious voyage. As time began to corrode the vessel, its components were replaced one by one — new planks, new oars, new sails — until no original part remained. Was it then, Plutarch asks, the same ship? There is no static, solid self. 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.

A quarter millennium later, Emily Dickinson would write in a poem the central metaphor of which draws on Kepler’s legacy:

Each that we lose takes part of us;
A crescent still abides,
Which like the moon, some turbid night,
Is summoned by the tides.

Unlike the prose of letters, pinned to the physical and emotional reality of the present, in poetry the imagination is allowed to travel between fact and fantasy, to traverse present, past, and future, so that the reader, and perhaps even the writer, is never quite sure — nor need ever ask — to what extent the images evoked correspond to the intersection of matter and moment we call reality.

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.

the most critical thing an aspiring writer can do, I think, is to always know why he or she is doing it and for whom. It’s fine to find gratification in the approval of others or in financial success or in any other extrinsic reward, but it’s toxic to make that approval or prestige the motive to write.