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
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Top Words
- life
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- meaning
- world
- science
- self
- creativity
- living
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- being
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All posts (548)
“Whatever inspiration is, it’s born from a continuous ‘I don’t know,'” the Polish poet Wisława Szymborska observed in her magnificent Nobel Prize acceptance speech. But despite all we know about the power of liminality and threshold states, we yearn for a firm foothold on one side of every blurry line and move...
“I’m so unused to being happy that I haven’t really come to terms with what it involves… I feel like a garden that’s finally been watered, so my flowers can bloom.” “All things are so very uncertain, and that’s exactly what makes me feel reassured,” says Too-ticky, trying to comfort the lost and frightened...
“Nothing like this has ever happened before or will ever happen again,” a friend said to me about a lucky turn of events — a statement that struck me as touchingly self-negating: a recognition that life has violated her predictions about what is possible, immediately followed by a reassertion of unquestioned...
“It’s permitted to receive solace for whatever you did or didn’t do, pitiful, beautiful human.” Few things in life are more painful than seeing ourselves act in ways orthogonal to our own values, watching helplessly as the consequences of those actions ripple out and hurt others, jolting us awake from the dream of...
You know it, that awful moment your coherent self-image shatters and a part of you, shadowy and untended, splits off to cause harm and havoc as the rest of you watches helplessly, wincing. You know the next moment, too — the desperate wish for an undo button you know cannot be had, no matter your protestations and...
“The emotional universes we inhabit are so distinct, and in deepest ways opposed, that nothing fruitful or sincere could ever emerge from association between us.” “To approach someone else convincingly you must do so with open arms and head held high, and your arms can’t be open unless your head is high,” the...
“All things are so very uncertain, and that’s exactly what makes me feel reassured,” one of the Moomins observes in Tove Jansson’s masterwork of philosophy disguised as a children’s book. It takes a great spaciousness and sobriety of spirit to be vitalized rather than paralyzed by uncertainty. Most of the time, we...
“This has nothing to do with premonitions, there is nothing supernatural or mysterious about it, what’s mysterious is that we pay no heed to it.” It starts with a tremble in the stomach, a palpitation in the chest. You may call it intuition, premonition, foreboding. You may press it down with the firm fist of...
“True solitude is found in the wild places, where one is without human obligation. One’s inner voices become audible… In consequence, one responds more clearly to other lives.” “One can’t write directly about the soul,” Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary. Few writers have come to write about it — and to it — more...
“Whatever inspiration is, it’s born from a continuous ‘I don’t know.’” “Attempt what is not certain. Certainty may or may not come later. It may then be a valuable delusion,” the great painter Richard Diebenkorn counseled in his ten rules for beginning creative projects. “One doesn’t arrive — in words or in art — by...
“Lovers’ reading of each other’s bodies… differs from the reading of written pages in that it is not linear… What makes lovemaking and reading resemble each other most is that within both of them times and spaces open, different from measurable time and space.” “I function only by falling in love: with French and...
The current of life is charged by the poles of hope and despair. What we make of our hopes and their devastation may be the purest measure of who we are and what we leave behind. Protest is what we call the resistance we launch against our reasons for despair — personal, political, existential. Although in its...
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