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
The point, of course, is to make yourself alive — to feel the force of being in your sinew and your spirit, to tremble with the beauty and the terror of it all, to breathe lungfuls of life that gasp you awake from the trance of...
“That point of self-education which consists in teaching the mind to resist its desires and inclinations, until they are proved to be right, is the most important of all.” The pioneering English physicist and chemist Michael Faraday...
You know that the price of life is death, that the price of love is loss, and still you watch the golden afternoon light fall on a face you love, knowing that the light will soon fade, knowing that the loving face too will one day fade...
Dissecting the philosophical conundrum of our “integrity of identity that persists over time, undergoing changes and yet still continuing to be.” Philosophers and New Age sages have long insisted that the self is a spiritual crutch —...
“There are more things … likely to frighten us than there are to crush us; we suffer more often in imagination than in reality.” “The truth is, we know so little about life, we don’t really know what the good news is and what the bad...
How many revolutions does the cog of culture make before a new truth about reality catches into gear? This essay is adapted from Figuring. This is how I picture it: A spindly middle-aged mathematician with a soaring mind, a sunken heart,...
“The Eye altering alters all.” In the middle of a London August in 1827, a small group of mourners gathered on a hill in the fields just north of the city limits at Bunhill Fields, named for “bone hill,” longtime burial ground for the...
“I have always felt that a human being could only be saved by another human being. I am aware that we do not save each other very often. But I am also aware that we save each other some of the time.” “Yesterday has already vanished among...
“As long as space and time divide you from anyone you love… love will simply have no choice but to go into battle with space and time and, furthermore, to win.” The longer I live, the more deeply I learn that love — whether we call it...
“Sit. Feast on your life.” The great Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh has written beautifully about why learning to love others begins with learning to love ourselves — a sentiment that the reactive modern cynic might dismiss as the vacant...
“Andersen had the courage to write stories with unhappy endings. He didn’t believe that you should try to be good because it pays … but because evil stems from intellectual and emotional stuntedness and is the one form of poverty that...
“The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia.” We are born into the certitude of our eventual death. Every once in a while, something —...
Collision and convergence in Truth and Beauty. On July 14, 1930, Albert Einstein (March 14, 1879–April 18, 1955) welcomed into his home on the outskirts of Berlin the Indian poet, philosopher, and musician Rabindranath Tagore (May 7,...
“What exists, exists so that it can be lost and become precious.” “When you realize you are mortal you also realize the tremendousness of the future. You fall in love with a Time you will never perceive,” the poet, painter, and...
The history of our species is the history of mistaking the limits of our imagination for the limits of the possible. It is salutary, I think, for us to be reminded regularly that this world is far wilder and more alien than we suppose it...