86 Quotes by Maria Popova

In a sentiment of remarkable prescience in the context of climate change denial half a century later, Carson articulated the formidable task before her: It is a great problem to know how to look at unpleasant facts that might have to be dealt with if one recognized their existence.

Questions of meaning are a function of human life, but they are not native to the universe itself—meaning is not what we find, but what we create with the lives we live and the seeds we plant and the organizing principles according to which we sculpt our personhood.

Above all, Somerville possessed the defining mark of the great scientist and the great human being—the ability to hold one’s opinions with firm but unfisted fingers, remaining receptive to novel theories and willing to change one’s mind in light of new evidence.

A quarter millennium later, Emily Dickinson would write in a poem the central metaphor of which draws on Kepler’s legacy:Each that we lose takes part of us;A crescent still abides,Which like the moon, some turbid night,Is summoned by the tides.

We can no more claim all credit for our achievement than deflect all blame for our impediments.

This false notion of the body as the testing ground for intimacy has long warped our understanding of what constitutes a romantic relationship. The measure of intimacy is not the quotient of friction between skin and skin, but something else entirely—something of the love and trust, the joy and ease that flow between two people as they inhabit that private world walled off from everything and everyone else.

I will die, you will die the atoms that huddled for a cosmic blink around a shadow of a self will return to the seas that made us. What will survive of us are shores seeds and stardust.

Can any author ever imagine just how far literature reaches into unfathomed horizons of culture, what it transforms and whom it liberates?

Ambition is disfigured into arrogance when it becomes unmoored from self-awareness, from a realistic assessment of one's competences.