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
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Top Words
- life
- love
- meaning
- world
- science
- self
- creativity
- living
- live
- being
- letter
- makes
All posts (548)
If you want to befriend time — which is how you come to befriend life — turn to stone. Climb a mountain and listen to the conversation between eons encoded in each stripe of rock. Walk a beach and comb your fingers through the golden dust that was once a mountain. Pick up a perfect oval pebble and feel its mute...
“Owning up: to recollect, to regret, to be responsible, ultimately to forgive and love.” Chance and choice converge to make us who we are, and although we may mistake chance for choice, our choices are the cobblestones, hard and uneven, that pave our destiny. They are ultimately all we can answer for and point to in...
“It isn’t perfect, not at all. It doesn’t need to be. It is, simply, what fills you up.” “For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks… the work for which all other work is but preparation,” Rilke wrote to the young poet seeking his advice a century ago. “Loving anybody...
This essay is adapted from Traversal. On April 5, 1815, as Napoleon is assembling his troops for the Battle of Waterloo, where he would meet his final defeat, the lieutenant-governor of Java leaps to his feet upon hearing the unmistakable roar of cannons in the distance while the setting sun is honeying the marble...
A wonder-smitten reminder “that for all the horrible chaos of the contemporary political scene this world is full of kindness.” In the early nineteenth century, the teenage Mary Godwin and her not-yet-husband Percy Bysshe Shelley left England for the Continent, traveling by foot and by mule, on the wings of love and...
Walking through the white-walled gallery at the graduation show of one of New York’s most esteemed art schools, between beautiful young people with Instagram faces, I was struck to see project after project take up as its subject the least durable, most illusory aspect of human existence: the self. Where was the...
“In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfill themselves according to their own laws… to represent themselves. Nothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a...
“The day steeps everything in golden liquid… A sidewalk cafe in the evening, with a wonderful amber light flooding through the doors and windows: huge, mad stars in an indigo sky. For this, you have to be great, crazy, or wildly in love.” “Only art penetrates what pride, passion, intelligence and habit erect on all...
Born in Iran and raised in Zimbabwe, Doris Lessing (October 22, 1919–November 17, 2013) was fourteen when she dropped out of school and eighty-eight when she won the Nobel Prize for smelting language into keys to “the prisons we choose to live inside.” Having lived in writing for nearly a century, through the rise...
On change, the measure of intelligence, the courage to take responsibility for our own lives. “He is the only God. And so am I and so are you,” William Blake said of Jesus in one of his prophetic koan-like pronouncements. A century after him, Hermann Hesse leaned on his reverence for nature as he considered the...
This essay and poem are part of the Universe in Verse book. Trees grant us some of the richest metaphors for our own lives — a polished lens on the quality of attention we pay the world. “The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing which stands in the way,” wrote William...
“It takes a special energy, over and above one’s creative potential, a special audacity or subversiveness, to strike out in a new direction once one is settled.” “And don’t ever imitate anybody,” Hemingway cautioned in his advice to aspiring writers. But in this particular sentiment, the otherwise insightful Nobel...
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