Maria Popova (July 28, 1984 -) And yet one of the most damning paradoxes of our condition is that, again and again, we withhold from others the loving sympathy and empathic understanding we demand for ourselves. When we lose the reins of our own character, when we lash out or sulk or act from a …
Maria Popova On Shoreless Seeds And Stardust
Maria Popova (July 28, 1984 -) Meanwhile, someplace in the world, somebody is making love and another a poem. Elsewhere in the universe, a star manyfold the mass of our third-rate sun is living out its final moments in a wild spin before collapsing into a black hole, its exhale bending spacetime itself into a …
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Maria Popova On Love
Maria Popova (July 28, 1984 -) Great loves, like great works of art, live at the crossing point of the improbable and the inevitable. That, at least, has been my experience, both as a scholar of history and as a private participant in the lives of the heart. Such loves come unbidden, without warning or …
Maria Popova On Dying
Maria Popova (July 28, 1984 -) We die. All of us — atoms to atoms, stardust to stardust, the mountain to the sea — you and I. The dual awareness of our improbable life and our inevitable death is what allows us to animate the interlude with love and beauty, with poems and fairy tales …
Maria Popova On Art From Heartache
Maria Popova (July 28, 1984 -) To make art out of heartache is, of course, the most beautiful thing one could do with one’s sorrow, as well as the most generous — no artist knows how the transfiguration of their pain into beauty will salve another heart, give another sorrower the language of their own …
Maria Popova On Artists
Maria Popova (July 28, 1984 -) To be an artist is to be a human being who feels everything more deeply, the beautiful as well as the terrible, and builds of those feelings bowers where others can safely and sacredly process their own.
Maria Popova On Solitude And Loneliness
Maria Popova (July 28, 1984 -) There is, of course, a universe of difference between solitude and loneliness — two radically different interior orientations toward the same exterior circumstance of lacking companionship. We speak of “fertile solitude” as a developmental achievement essential for our creative capacity, but loneliness is barren and destructive; it cottons in …
Maria Popova On Speaking And Listening
Maria Popova (July 28, 1984 -) Every act of communication is an act of tremendous courage in which we give ourselves over to two parallel possibilities: the possibility of planting into another mind a seed sprouted in ours and watching it blossom into a breathtaking flower of mutual understanding; and the possibility of being wholly …
Maria Popova On The Golden Age
Maria Popova (July 28, 1984 -) ...that this is the golden age within a lifetime, (mid-twenties to late thirties) when we have transcended the know-it-all arrogance of youth, haven’t yet entered the know-it-all complacency of old age, and live with that wondrous combination of receptivity to new ideas and just enough not-yet-calcified intellectual foundation with …
Maria Popova On Chance and Choice
Maria Popova (July 28, 1984 -) Chance and choice converge to make us who we are, and although we may mistake chance for choice, our choices are the cobblestones, hard and uneven, that pave our destiny. They are ultimately all we can answer for and point to in the architecture of our character.
Maria Popova On Communication
Maria Popova (July 28, 1984 -) Every act of communication is an act of tremendous courage in which we give ourselves over to two parallel possibilities: the possibility of planting into another mind a seed sprouted in ours and watching it blossom into a breathtaking flower of mutual understanding; and the possibility of being wholly …
Maria Popova On Depression
Maria Popova (July 28, 1984 -) In my own experience, the most withering aspect of depression is the way it erases, like physical illness does, the memory of wellness. The totality of the erasure sweeps away the elemental belief that another state of being is at all possible — the sensorial memory of what it …
