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
- self
- science
- creativity
- living
- being
- live
- letter
- makes
All posts (540)
Language is a container for thought and feeling that shapes the contents. The great danger is that we come to mistake the shape for the substance, reducing concepts and experiences we cannot name or contain to the words tasked with holding the spill of the ineffable. (This is what makes The Dictionary of Obscure...
How the warm rays of hope and healing enter the dark inner chamber of leaden loneliness through the unexpected cracks of kindness. “Sometimes one has simply to endure a period of depression for what it may hold of illumination if one can live through it, attentive to what it exposes or demands,” the poet May Sarton...
“We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come… We live everything as it comes, without warning.” “Live as if you were living already for the second time,” Viktor Frankl wrote in his 1946 masterwork on the human...
“And it is so simple… You will instantly find how to live.” One November night in the 1870s, legendary Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky (November 11, 1821–February 9, 1881) discovered the meaning of life in a dream — or, at least, the protagonist in his final short story did. The piece, which first appeared in the...
If you want to befriend time — which is how you come to befriend life — turn to stone. Climb a mountain and listen to the conversation between eons encoded in each stripe of rock. Walk a beach and comb your fingers through the golden dust that was once a mountain. Pick up a perfect oval pebble and feel its mute...
“Owning up: to recollect, to regret, to be responsible, ultimately to forgive and love.” Chance and choice converge to make us who we are, and although we may mistake chance for choice, our choices are the cobblestones, hard and uneven, that pave our destiny. They are ultimately all we can answer for and point to in...
“It isn’t perfect, not at all. It doesn’t need to be. It is, simply, what fills you up.” “For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks… the work for which all other work is but preparation,” Rilke wrote to the young poet seeking his advice a century ago. “Loving anybody...
This essay is adapted from Traversal. On April 5, 1815, as Napoleon is assembling his troops for the Battle of Waterloo, where he would meet his final defeat, the lieutenant-governor of Java leaps to his feet upon hearing the unmistakable roar of cannons in the distance while the setting sun is honeying the marble...
A wonder-smitten reminder “that for all the horrible chaos of the contemporary political scene this world is full of kindness.” In the early nineteenth century, the teenage Mary Godwin and her not-yet-husband Percy Bysshe Shelley left England for the Continent, traveling by foot and by mule, on the wings of love and...
Walking through the white-walled gallery at the graduation show of one of New York’s most esteemed art schools, between beautiful young people with Instagram faces, I was struck to see project after project take up as its subject the least durable, most illusory aspect of human existence: the self. Where was the...
“In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfill themselves according to their own laws… to represent themselves. Nothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a...
“The day steeps everything in golden liquid… A sidewalk cafe in the evening, with a wonderful amber light flooding through the doors and windows: huge, mad stars in an indigo sky. For this, you have to be great, crazy, or wildly in love.” “Only art penetrates what pride, passion, intelligence and habit erect on all...
Page 26 of 45