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 (505)
“It is very important to be in love with life… Life is very fragile and always elusive. As soon as we think we ‘understand,’ there is another mystery. I don’t understand anything. That is, I think, the key to understand everything.” “Life loves the liver of it,” Maya Angelou observed as she contemplated the meaning...
“What is it like, such intensity of pain?” There are times in life when the firmament of our being seems to collapse, taking all the light with it, swallowing all color and sound into a silent scream of darkness. It rarely looks that way from the inside, but these are always times of profound transformation and...
“Leave something of sweetness and substance in the mouth of the world.” I lost my darling friend Emily Levine (October 23, 1944–February 3, 2019) just as Figuring, in which she rightly occupies the first line of the acknowledgements, was being released. The book would not have existed without her, nor would The...
The most paradoxical thing about creative work is that it is both a way in and a way out, that it plunges you into the depths of your being and at the same time takes you out of yourself. Writing is the best instrument I have for metabolizing my experience and clarifying my own mind in such a way that I am no longer...
“Since our consciousness plays some part in what comes into being, the play of attention can both create and destroy, but it never leaves its object unchanged.” Whatever fundamental reality might exist, we live out our lives in a subjective reality defined by what we agree to attend to. “An act of pure attention, if...
“In order to control myself I must first accept myself by going with and not against my nature.” With his singular blend of physical prowess and metaphysical wisdom, coupled with his tragic untimely death, legendary Chinese-American martial artist, philosopher, and filmmaker Bruce Lee (November 27, 1940–July 20,...
Life-affirming inspiration from a man who knew intimately “that intensity of thought, which will some times wear the sweetest idea thread-bare and turn it to the bitterness of death.” “I am now the most miserable man living,” Abraham Lincoln (February 12, 1809–April 15, 1865) wrote to his law partner three weeks...
“The body’s judgment is as good as the mind’s… We get into the habit of living before acquiring the habit of thinking.” “If the universe is meaningless, so is the statement that it is so… The meaning and purpose of dancing is the dance,” Alan Watts wrote in his 1951 meditation on how we wrest meaning from reality....
From butterflies to Beethoven, an ode to the heart’s uncontainable dimensions. A version of this essay appears in the final chapters of Figuring. As if classifying platonic relationships weren’t complex enough a task — one that requires a taxonomy of friendship types — what happens when the platonic and the romantic...
“In old age we should wish still to have passions strong enough to prevent us turning in on ourselves.” We live in a culture that dreads the entropic inevitability of growing older, treats it like a disease to be cured with potions and regimens, anesthetizes it with botox and silence, somehow forgetting that to grow...
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