The Marginalian
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?
Latest Posts
“Our neurons must be used … not only to know but also to transform knowledge; not only to experience but also to construct.” “Principles are good and worth the effort only when they develop into deeds,” Van Gogh wrote to his brother in a...
“No one can build you the bridge on which you, and only you, must cross the river of life,” wrote the thirty-year-old Nietzsche. “The true and durable path into and through experience,” Nobel-winning poet Seamus Heaney counseled the...
“Love, but be careful what you love,” the Roman African philosopher Saint Augustine wrote in the final years of the fourth century. We are, in some deep sense, what we love — we become it as much as it becomes us, beckoned from our...
“Susie… come home… and be my own again, and kiss me as you used to… I hope for you so much, and feel so eager for you… that the expectation… makes me feel hot and feverish, and my heart beats so fast.” Four months before her twentieth...
“What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery?” asked the Proust Questionnaire. “Living in fear,” answered David Bowie. The most menacing word of the three is the smallest, for fear really is something we live inside, not with — a...
“It is not easy to give closeness and freedom, safety plus danger.” One of the hardest realizations in life, and one of the most liberating, is that our mothers are neither saints nor saviors — they are just people who, however messy or...
One of the hardest realizations in life, and one of the most liberating, is that our mothers are neither saints nor saviors — they are just people who, however messy or painful our childhood may have been, and however complicated the...
“It wouldn’t have been failure to be bankrupt, dishonoured, pilloried, hanged; it was failure not to be anything.” “The things we want are transformative, and we don’t know or only think we know what is on the other side of that...
“Self-hate is really the same thing as sheer egoism, and in the long run breeds the same cruel isolation and despair.” “To be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to...
“When I die, I want to be sung across the threshold.” A person is a note in the mouth of probability hungry for song, reverberating with echoes of the impossible. To exist at all is as close as this universe of austere laws and inert...
Here is the mathematical logic of the spirit: If love is the quality of attention we pay something other than ourselves and hate is the veil of not understanding ourselves, then loving the world more — the other word for which is...
To have a strong feeling about anything is to discover something about the poles of your own mind, some potent charge reason can’t touch that electrifies life with an energy you don’t fully understand yet can’t and often don’t want to...
The astonishing thing is that even though we will never truly know what it is like to be another creature or another person or any configuration of chemistry and chance other than ourselves, we are made of the same matter as the granite...
Time is the book we fill with the story of our lives. All great storytelling has the shape of music. All music is a shelter in time. In these lives hounded by restlessness, trembling with urgency, we need this shelter, need a place still...
There are times in life when the continent of certainty parts underfoot and, as the ash cloud of the old world rains darkness upon us, we are asked to swim in the rivers of lava that will make the new. “Almost it would appear that it is...