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
“What is happiness but growth in peace.” In a culture predicated on the perpetual pursuit of happiness, as if it were a fugitive on the loose, it can be hard to discern what having happiness actually feels like, how it actually lives in...
“As always happens with contradictions, something in the assumptions has to give… Declaring something impossible leads to more things being possible.” “Everything that is possible is real,” Bach scribbled in the margins of his music...
Few things in life are more devastating than to give something your all and still fail. Not the “fail better” of startup culture, not the “fail forward” of self-help, not the failure that is childhood’s fulcrum of learning, not the...
“It was the great and eternal made visible: a confluence of opposites, their fusing together in the fire of reality. It meant nothing… or, rather, it meant everything… and it was beautiful, it was happiness and meaning… like an earful of...
“At the end of my life, I know I won’t be wishing I’d held more back, been less effusive, more often stood on ceremony, forgiven less, spent more days oblivious to the secret wishes and fears of the people around me.” The price we pay...
There comes a moment in every life when you find yourself suddenly wondering about the point of it all — the point of all that productivity, the point of so-called success, the point of the poem that is the universe. It is a hollowing, a...
“How is it that I seem to be this Margaret Fuller? What does it mean? What shall I do about it?” This essay is adapted from the sixth chapter of Figuring. “I am determined on distinction,” Margaret Fuller (May 23, 1810–July 19, 1850)...
“There is nothing more revealing than to see a thinking person walking, just as there is nothing more revealing than to see a walking person thinking… Walking and thinking are in a perpetual relationship that is based on trust.” “I: how...
They didn’t imagine it, the dying dinosaurs, that they would grow wings and become birds, become the laboratory in which evolution invented dreams and the cathedral in which it invented faith. “There is grandeur in this view of life,”...
The great paradox, the great pain of human relationships is that they are so often not relational: two lonelinesses colliding without real contact, one or both orienting to the other not as a person but as a projection, mistaking for...
War is an ism — nationalism, dogmatism, capitalism — paid for by an is: the living beingness of human beings made a sacrificial offering to an ideology so powerful it has quelled the two things that make us most human: compassion and...
“You may have to break your heart, but it isn’t nothing to know even one moment alive.” The morning after a relationship of depth and significance long bending under the weight of its own complexity had finally broken with an exhausted...
You may or may not find the meaning of life while pacing a flower bed, but each time you plunge your bare hands into the hummus of the Earth and run your fingers through the roots of something that hungers for the sun, you are resisting...
“Life [exists] only because of a myriad of synchronicities that bring us to this particular place at this particular moment. In return for such a gift, the only sane response is to glitter in reply.” “Attention without feeling,” Mary...
“In the mind’s eye, a fractal is a way of seeing infinity.” I have learned that the lines we draw to contain the infinite end up excluding more than they enfold. I have learned that most things in life are better and more beautiful not...