86 Quotes by Maria Popova

Be curious. Be constantly, consistently, indiscriminatel y curious.

Perhaps, after all, we aren’t divided so much into mind and body as into mind and mind. And few forces can propel humanity forward more reliably than the cleaving together of kindred minds in solidarity to a shared truth.

Our chronic discomfort with ambiguity – which, ironically, is critical to both our creativity and the richness of our lives – leads us to lock down safe, comfortable, familiar interpretations, even if they are only partial representations of or fully disconnected from reality.

This is the power of art: The power to transcend our own self-interest, our solipsistic zoom-lens on life, and relate to the world and each other with more integrity, more curiosity, more wholeheartedness.

Build pockets of stillness into your life.

Greatness is consistency driven by a deep love of the work.

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.

When we encounter a person of exceptional intellectual and creative vitality, their magnetism can disorient the compass needle of admiration and attraction – it becomes difficult, sometimes impossible, to tease apart the desire to be with from the desire to be like.

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.