86 Quotes by Maria Popova

We suffer by wanting different things often at odds with one another, but we suffer even more by wanting to want different things.

Memory and motive are the two edges of the blade by which we slice experience out of events and carve out history - personal, political, civilizational - from the trunk of life. Both are highly selective - memory retrospectively so and motive prospectively.

Language is not the content of thought but the vessel into which we pour the ambivalences and contradictions of our thinking, afloat on the current of time.

Some of our dormant multitudes come awake with a catlike stretch, slowly and lazily over years of personal development. Others leap into being with the jolt of an alarm sounded by a particular event or person who has entered our lives at a particular moment—rarely anticipated, almost never convenient, always transformational. On those rare, momentous mornings, one looks into the bathroom mirror and greets—sometimes grudgingly, sometimes gleefully—the gladsome stranger of oneself.

Even the farthest seers can't bend their gaze beyond their era's horizon of possibility, but the horizon shifts with each incremental revolution as the human mind peers outward to take in nature, then turns inward to question its own givens. We sieve the world through the mesh of these certitudes, tautened by nature and culture, but every once in a while—whether by accident or conscious effort—the wire loosens and the kernel of revolution slips through.

What solidity of sentiment it takes not to let an awareness of the moment's impermanence dilute its richness, its sweetness, but purify it and saturate it with the utmost "fullness of being.

Life is infinitely more interesting when considered for the questions it raises rather than for the answers it bestows.

Behind each door of what-if lies an unanswerable question that unhinges an infinite Rube Goldberg machine of probabilities. The life we have is the only one we will ever know, and even that with tenuous certainty.

But interpretation invariably reveals more about the interpreter than about the interpreted. The gap between intention and interpretation is always rife with wrongs, especially when writer and reader occupy vastly different strata of emotional maturity and intellectual sophistication.