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
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All posts (540)
“A sign of health in the mind is the ability of one individual to enter imaginatively and yet accurately into the thoughts and feelings and hopes and fears of another person; also to allow the other person to do the same to us.” “I have always felt that a human being could only be saved by another human being,”...
“All your sorrows have been wasted on you if you have not yet learned how to be wretched.” “Grief, when it comes, is nothing like we expect it to be,” Joan Didion observed in her classic meditation on loss. Abraham Lincoln, in his moving letter of consolation to a grief-stricken young woman, wrote of how time...
“The alternations between love and its denial, suffering and denial of suffering … constitute the most essential and ubiquitous structural feature of the human heart.” “The state of enchantment is one of certainty,” W.H. Auden wrote in his commonplace book. “When enchanted, we neither believe nor doubt nor deny: we...
“I have nothing, except for certain, and perhaps very minor, literary abilities.” Aristotle believed that everyone’s true calling lies at the crossing point of their natural talent and the world’s need. But this simple, seductive equivalence breaks down as soon as we account for the myriad factors that go into the...
“Love the earth and sun and the animals… re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul…” Walt Whitman (May 31, 1819–March 26, 1892) was thirty-six when he self-published Leaves of Grass (public library | public domain). Amid its dispiriting initial...
This essay is adapted from Traversal. We look at a thing — a bird, a ball, a planet — and perceive it to be a certain color. But what we are really seeing is the color that does not inhere in it—the portion of the spectrum it shirks, the wavelength of light it reflects back unabsorbed. Our world appears a swirling...
“To live, we must die every instant. We must perish again and again in the storms that make life possible.” “The self, the place where we live, is a place of illusion. Goodness is connected with the attempt to see the unself… to pierce the veil of selfish consciousness and join the world as it really is,” Iris...
“Is there anything we know more intimately than the fleetingness of time, the transience of each and every moment?” “An hour, once it lodges in the queer element of the human spirit, may be stretched to fifty or a hundred times its clock length,” Virginia Woolf marveled at the extraordinary elasticity of how we...
“Beyond the difficulty of communicating oneself, there is the supreme difficulty of being oneself.” It is an ongoing mystery: What makes you and your childhood self the same person. Across a lifetime of physiological and psychological change, some center holds. Eudora Welty called it “the continuous thread of...
“While wandering down the path of wonder, I briefly escape the world of separation and enter the world of unity.” It bears repeating that what makes life livable is our ability — our willingness — to move through the world wonder-smitten by reality. The most wonderful thing about wonder is that it knows no scale, no...
“Crisis… is an attempt to dislodge us from a toxic status quo and constitutes an insistent call to rebuild our lives on a more authentic and sincere basis.” The moment we begin to see that there are infinitely many kinds of beautiful lives, we cease being captive to the myth of normalcy — the cultural tyranny that...
It is hard to know why we are here, what we can make of the transience we can do nothing about, how we can fill every borrowed atom of matter with meaning. It is hard not to take for givens the answers handed down to us by our culture, our parents, our peers, our heroes. There are those rare moments — for Virginia...
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