The Marginalian
Maria Popova
Hello. My name is Maria Popova and The Marginalian is a record of my reading and reckoning with our search for meaning: sometimes through science and philosophy, sometimes through poetry and children’s books, always through the lens of wonder. Founded in 2006 as an email to seven friends under the outgrown name Brain Pickings and since included in the Library of Congress permanent web archive of culturally valuable materials, it remains a one-woman labor of love animated by the ultimate question that binds us all: What is all this?
August 2026
September 2026
October 2026
Top Words
- life
- love
- meaning
- world
- science
- self
- creativity
- living
- being
- live
- letter
- makes
All posts (539)
“So often loneliness comes from being out of touch with parts of oneself.” “How are we so optimistic, so careful not to trip and yet do trip, and then get up and say OK?” Maira Kalman pondered in her visual philosophy. Such is the magnificent resilience of the human spirit. Our culture is haunted by the unholy ghost...
“It’s terribly dangerous for an artist to fulfill other people’s expectations” Every creator’s creations are their coping mechanism for life — for the loneliness of being, for the longing for connection, for the dazzling incomprehension of what it all means. What we call art is simply a gesture toward some authentic...
“Our first questions about the value of a book, of a human being, or a musical composition are: Can they walk? Even more, can they dance?” Almost everything I write, I “write” in the notebook of the mind, with the foot in motion — what happens at the keyboard upon returning from the long daily walks that sustain me...
“It’s part of being human to fall short of that total acceptance and ultimate understanding — and often far short.” Being responsible for ourselves, knowing our own wants and meeting them, is difficult enough — so difficult that the notion of being responsible for anyone else, knowing anyone else’s innermost desires...
We know good people when we encounter them, when they fall upon our lives like a sunbeam, like a song. But we don’t always know what makes them good. It has, of course, a lot to do with kindness. It has to do with their capacity to give, and also to receive. It has to do with their courage of uncertainty. And yet...
“Brute force crushes many plants. Yet the plants rise again. The Pyramids will not last a moment compared with the daisy.” We live in a culture that has warped strength from the measure of our interior tenacity into the magnitude of our forceful self-assertion. We also live in a culture that has warped sensitivity...
Here we are, bewildered miracles of chemistry and chance, trembling embers of dead stars capable of sign and song, a wild bet against probability that won. We have dreamt up origin myths and cosmological models, built the Taj Mahal and the Large Hadron Collider, to fathom where we came from and where we are going....
“Perfection of means and confusion of goals seem — in my opinion — to characterize our age.” What makes Albert Einstein (March 14, 1879–April 18, 1955) endure as “the quintessential modern genius” isn’t merely his monumental contribution to science but also his unflinching faith in the human spirit and in our...
It started with an urn for living gone wrong, the clay kiltering off center, resisting my every effort to force it back into shape. The harder I pushed to control it, the more it took on a life of its own, folding like flesh, bending like mind. I pushed and despaired, pushed and despaired, until, exhausted and...
“Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but most of all, endurance.” In 1989, Paris Review founding editor and trailblazing interviewer George Plimpton edited a wonderful collection titled The Writer’s Chapbook: A Compendium of Fact,...
“Q: What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery? A: Living in fear.” In the 1880s, long before he claimed his status as one of the greatest authors of all time, teenage Marcel Proust (July 10, 1871–November 18, 1922) filled out an English-language questionnaire given to him by his friend Antoinette, the...
There are, in my experience, two fundaments of the creative life: putting yourself regularly in the path of wonder and getting out of your own way in order to receive what you encounter there. Wonder, like enchantment, is not something you can control or plan for or will — it is something that befalls you, overcomes...
Page 2 of 45