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
“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...
The only thing more dangerous than wanting to save another person — a dangerous desire too often mistaken for love — is wanting to save yourself, to spare yourself the disappointment and heartbreak and loss inseparable from being a...
Born into a World War to live through another, Albert Camus (November 7, 1913–January 4, 1960) died in a car crash with an unused train ticket to the same destination in his pocket. Just three years earlier, he had become the...
A hymn of rage, a hymn of redemption, and a timeless love letter to the possible. “Day by day I am approaching the goal which I apprehend but cannot describe,” Ludwig van Beethoven (December 16, 1770–March 26, 1827) wrote to his boyhood...
“The universe is the ultimate free lunch.” “Every formula which expresses a law of nature is a hymn of praise to God,” the trailblazing astronomer and leading Figuring figure Maria Mitchell wrote in the second half of the nineteenth...
Ravishing otherworldly wonders of the cosmos beneath the surface, from the first expedition to prove that life exists in the depths. “While stroking an octopus, it is easy to fall into reverie,” naturalist Sy Montgomery wrote in her...
“An exquisite peace obtains: a drowsy, golden peace, flowing honey-sweet over my dwelling, soaking it, dripping like music from the walls… A peace for gods; a divine emptiness.” There is a form of being together that feels as easy and...
“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,” Ursula K. Le Guin wrote in her...
“Nothing beats kindness… It sits quietly beyond all things.” “What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery?” the Proust Questionnaire asked David Bowie. “Living in fear.” Partway in time between Proust and Bowie, the young Hannah...
Marbling the waters of every ocean with their billows of black and white, orcas are Earth’s most creative and most successful apex predator. Although they are known as killer whales, they are the largest member of the dolphin family....