86 Quotes by Maria Popova

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.

Life is a continual process of arrival into who we are.

Those accustomed to hard work and self-propulsion, who have risen to the zenith of accomplishment by force of will and magnitude of effort, are most susceptible to the supreme self-damnation of human life – the belief that love is something to be earned by striving rather than something that comes unbidden like a shepherd’s song on a summer evening in the mountains of Bulgaria.

Because it is possible to create – creating one’s self, willing to be one’s self – one has anxiety. One would have no anxiety if there were no possibility whatever.

Kepler knew what we habitually forget – that the locus of possibility expands when the unimaginable is imagined and then made real through systematic effort.

Curation is a form of pattern recognition – pieces of information or insight which over time amount to an implicit point of view.

Decrying the sublimation of women’s minds to domesticity, Fuller asserts that “a house is no home unless it contain food and fire for the mind as well as for the body” and admonishes that “human beings are not so constituted that they can live without expansion.

In order for us to truly create and contribute to the world, we have to be able to connect countless dots, to cross-pollinate ideas from a wealth of disciplines, to combine and recombine these pieces and build new castles.

Lives interweave with other lives, and out of the tapestry arise hints at answers to questions that raze to the bone of life: What are the building blocks of character, of contentment, of lasting achievement? How does a person come into self-possession and sovereignty of mind against the tide of convention and unreasoning collectivism? Does genius suffice for happiness, does distinction, does love?