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?
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“You are this body, and you are these molecules, and you are these atoms, and you are these quantum entities, and you are the quantum foam, and you are the energetic field of space-time, and, ultimately, you are the fundamental awareness...
“Make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life.” “If you can fall in love again and again,” Henry Miller wrote as he...
“It appears like an innocuous illness. Monotony, boredom, death. Millions live like this (or die like this) without knowing it.” Galileo believed that books are our only means of having superhuman powers. For Carl Sagan, a book was...
“To see takes time, like to have a friend takes time.” In her stunning autobiographical reflection on the moment she understood what it means to be an artist, Virginia Woolf beheld the cosmos of connections in a single flower. Decades...
“The life of sensation is the life of greed; it requires more and more. The life of the spirit requires less and less.” The meaning of life has been pondered by such literary icons as Leo Tolstoy (1904), Henry Miller (1918), Anaïs Nin...
“Words are events, they do things, change things. They transform both speaker and hearer; they feed energy back and forth and amplify it. They feed understanding or emotion back and forth and amplify it.” Every act of communication is an...
The meaning of life, in a short verse. “Don’t make stuff because you want to make money — it will never make you enough money. And don’t make stuff because you want to get famous — because you will never feel famous enough,” John Green...
“The art of losing isn’t hard to master,” Elizabeth Bishop wrote in one of the great masterpieces of poetry. “Every mortal loss is an Immortal Gain,” William Blake wrote two centuries before her in his beautiful letter to a bereaved...
“Music so readily transports us from the present to the past, or from what is actual to what is possible.” “Music,” the trailblazing composer Julia Perry wrote, “has a unifying effect on the peoples of the world, because they all...
“When you love someone, the best thing you can offer that person is your presence.” “Fearlessness is what love seeks,” Hannah Arendt wrote in her magnificent early work on love and how to live with fear. “Such fearlessness exists only in...
“What is wild cannot be bought or sold, borrowed or copied. It is. Unmistakable, unforgettable, unshamable, elemental as earth and ice, water, fire and air, a quintessence, pure spirit, resolving into no constituents. Don’t waste your...
“In much of your talking, thinking is half murdered. For thought is a bird of space, that in a cage of words may indeed unfold its wings but cannot fly.” Something strange and wondrous begins to happen when one spends stretches of time...
“How can a creature who will certainly die have an understanding of things that will exist forever?” When my atheist engineer grandfather died, my atheist engineer grandmother leaned over the body in the hospice bed that had contained...
Just before he formulated his revolutionary laws of planetary motion and just after completing the world’s first work of science fiction, which landed his mother in a witchcraft trial, Johannes Kepler grew fascinated with the geometry of...
“Nothing in the world is more exciting than a moment of sudden discovery or invention, and many more people are capable of experiencing such moments than is sometimes thought.” Bertrand Russell (May 18, 1872–February 2, 1970) endures as...