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?
July 2026
August 2026
September 2026
Top Words
- life
- love
- meaning
- world
- self
- living
- science
- being
- live
- creativity
All posts (501)
HOW TO CHANGE YOUR LIFE by Maria Popova Don’t try to wash your tired hands clean from the bloodshed of your private wars. Just unclench the fist that has come to feel like home and let the story slip between your trembling fingers into the river of time, silver and indifferent. You may have to kneel for days or...
“There is no description of a life without an account of the changes that are possible within it.” When answering the Orion questionnaire, a question stopped me up short by contracting an incomprehensible expanse of complexity into a binary: Are you the same person you were as a child? It is fundamentally a question...
“Think not you can direct the course of love, for love, if it finds you worthy, directs your course.” “Love is the quality of attention we pay to things,” poet J.D. McClatchy wrote in his beautiful meditation on the contrast and complementarity of love and desire. And what we choose to attend to — our fear or our...
“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...
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