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
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Top Words
- life
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- meaning
- world
- self
- living
- science
- being
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- creativity
All posts (505)
“There are more things … likely to frighten us than there are to crush us; we suffer more often in imagination than in reality.” “The truth is, we know so little about life, we don’t really know what the good news is and what the bad news is,” Kurt Vonnegut observed in discussing Hamlet during his influential...
How many revolutions does the cog of culture make before a new truth about reality catches into gear? This essay is adapted from Figuring. This is how I picture it: A spindly middle-aged mathematician with a soaring mind, a sunken heart, and bad skin is being thrown about the back of a carriage in the bone-hollowing...
“The Eye altering alters all.” In the middle of a London August in 1827, a small group of mourners gathered on a hill in the fields just north of the city limits at Bunhill Fields, named for “bone hill,” longtime burial ground for the disgraceful dead. There, in what was now a dissenters’ cemetery, the English Poor...
“I have always felt that a human being could only be saved by another human being. I am aware that we do not save each other very often. But I am also aware that we save each other some of the time.” “Yesterday has already vanished among the shadows of the past; to-morrow has not yet emerged from the future. You...
“As long as space and time divide you from anyone you love… love will simply have no choice but to go into battle with space and time and, furthermore, to win.” The longer I live, the more deeply I learn that love — whether we call it friendship or family or romance — is the work of mirroring and magnifying each...
“Sit. Feast on your life.” The great Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh has written beautifully about why learning to love others begins with learning to love ourselves — a sentiment that the reactive modern cynic might dismiss as the vacant fodder of self-help books, but one which more considered reflection reveals to be...
“Andersen had the courage to write stories with unhappy endings. He didn’t believe that you should try to be good because it pays … but because evil stems from intellectual and emotional stuntedness and is the one form of poverty that should be shunned.” “If you want your children to be intelligent,” Einstein is...
“The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia.” We are born into the certitude of our eventual death. Every once in a while, something — perhaps an encounter with a robin’s egg, perhaps a poem — staggers us with the...
Collision and convergence in Truth and Beauty. On July 14, 1930, Albert Einstein (March 14, 1879–April 18, 1955) welcomed into his home on the outskirts of Berlin the Indian poet, philosopher, and musician Rabindranath Tagore (May 7, 1861–August 7, 1941) — the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize. The two...
“What exists, exists so that it can be lost and become precious.” “When you realize you are mortal you also realize the tremendousness of the future. You fall in love with a Time you will never perceive,” the poet, painter, and philosopher Etel Adnan observed as she beheld impermanence and transcendence at the foot...
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