86 Quotes by Maria Popova

Guilt is the flip side of prestige and they’re both horrible reasons to do something.

I am driven by the yearning to learn how to live; how to lead a meaningful life; the fear of not having yet learned how to die.

When people tell you who they are, Maya Angelou famously advised, believe them. Just as importantly, however, when people try to tell you who you are, don’t believe them. You are the only custodian of your own integrity, and the assumptions made by those that misunderstand who you are and what you stand for reveal a great deal about them and absolutely nothing about you.

Are we to despair or rejoice over the fact that even the greatest loves exist only “for a time”? The time scales are elastic, contracting and expanding with the depth and magnitude of each love, but they are always finite – like books, like lives, like the universe itself. The triumph of love is in the courage and integrity with which we inhabit the transcendent transience that binds two people for the time it binds them, before letting go with equal courage and integrity.

We go through life seeing reality not as it really is, in its unfathomable depths of complexity and contradiction, but as we hope or fear or expect it to be. Too often, we confuse certainty for truth and the strength of our beliefs for the strength of the evidence. When we collide with the unexpected, with the antipode to our hopes, we are plunged into bewildered despair. We rise from the pit only by love. Perhaps Keats had it slightly wrong – perhaps truth is love and love is truth.

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.

However divided we may feel within ourselves, it is the sum total of our warring fractions that make us who we are – fragmentary but indivisible.

Boredom is not only an adaptive emotion but a vital one with its related faculties of contemplation, solitude, and stillness. It is essential for the life of the mind and the life of the spirit.

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.