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)
“There is only one solitude, and it is large and not easy to bear… People are drawn to the easy and to the easiest side of the easy. But it is clear that we must hold ourselves to the difficult.” “You are born alone. You die alone. The value of the space in between is trust and love,” artist Louise Bourgeois wrote...
“Death makes human beings seem like very small containers that are packed so densely we can only be aware of a fraction of what’s inside us from moment to moment.” “Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself,” Kahlil Gibran wrote in his poignant verse on...
“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 his young correspondent. The great difficulty of loving arises from the great difficulty of bridging the abyss between one consciousness and another in...
“Our task at midlife is to be strong enough to relinquish the ego-urgencies of the first half and open ourselves to a greater wonder.” “In the middle of the journey of our life I found myself within a dark woods where the straight way was lost,” Dante wrote in the Inferno. “The perilous time for the most highly...
For all the enchantment the color blue has cast upon humanity, no animal has fallen under its spell more hopelessly than the bowerbird, whose very survival hinges on blue. In a small clearing on the forest floor, the male weaves twigs and branches into an elaborate bower, which he decorates exclusively with blue...
“You are this body, and you are these molecules, and you are these atoms, and you are these quantum entities, and you are the quantum foam, and you are the energetic field of space-time, and, ultimately, you are the fundamental awareness out of which all these emerge.” “This life of yours which you are living is not...
“Make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life.” “If you can fall in love again and again,” Henry Miller wrote as he contemplated the measure of a life well lived on the precipice of turning...
“It appears like an innocuous illness. Monotony, boredom, death. Millions live like this (or die like this) without knowing it.” Galileo believed that books are our only means of having superhuman powers. For Carl Sagan, a book was “proof that humans are capable of working magic.” Proust considered the end of a...
“To see takes time, like to have a friend takes time.” In her stunning autobiographical reflection on the moment she understood what it means to be an artist, Virginia Woolf beheld the cosmos of connections in a single flower. Decades later, the Nobel-winning physicist Richard Feynman offered a different,...
“The life of sensation is the life of greed; it requires more and more. The life of the spirit requires less and less.” The meaning of life has been pondered by such literary icons as Leo Tolstoy (1904), Henry Miller (1918), Anaïs Nin (1946), Viktor Frankl (1946), Italo Calvino (1975), and David Foster Wallace...
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