Articles by Maria Popova
We found 377 results.
A Lighthouse for Dark Times
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
18 Nov 2024
It is during phase transition that the system is most pliant, most possible. This chaos of particles that liquefies solids and vaporizes liquids is the creative force by which the new order of a more stable structure finds itself. The world would not exist without these discomposing transitions when everything seems to be falling apart and entropy has the last word.
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The Antidote to the Irreversibility of Life: Hannah Arendt on What Forgiveness Really Means
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
11 Nov 2024
The very need for forgiveness springs from “the irreversibility and unpredictability of the process started by acting” — a process fundamental to what it means to be alive.
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Kafka’s Creative Block and the Four Psychological Hindrances That Keep the Talented from Manifesting Their Talent
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
4 Nov 2024
Of all the writers who have kept a journal as a creative catalysis and a salve for self-doubt, no one has confronted those psychic hindrances between the talented and the fruition of their talent more pointedly than Franz Kafka.
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The Poetic Science of the Ghost Pipe: Emily Dickinson and the Secret of Earth’s Most Supernatural Flower
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
28 Oct 2024
Any flower would have been a fitting emblem for the poet who believed that “to be a Flower is profound Responsibility,” but none more than a flower she had pressed into her poems, enchanted by its “almost supernatural” appearance.
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Maya Angelou on Courage and Facing Evil
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
21 Oct 2024
In 1982, poet and civil rights activist Maya Angelou and interviewer Bill Moyers traveled to Texas countryside to discuss the ugliest aspects of human nature at a conference titled Facing Evil.
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Kinship in the Light of Conscience: Peter Kropotkin on the Crucial Difference Between Love, Sympathy, and Solidarity
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
14 Oct 2024
Scientist and anarchist Peter Kropotkin on the meaning of solidarity–the culmination of his studies of the cooperation networks of social insects and his outrage at the destructive power structures of human society.
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Curiosity as an Instrument of Love: Thoreau and the Little Owl
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
7 Oct 2024
True curiosity is an open wonderment at what something is and how it works without emotional attachment to the outcome. “Life! who knows what it is, what it does?” Thoreau exclaimed on the pages of his journal.
→ read full articleThe Milky Way, the Pond, and the Meaning of Life: Thoreau on Solitude, Sympathy, and the Salve for Melancholy
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
30 Sep 2024
In one of the boldest and most shimmering passages in all of literature, Thoreau writes: “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”
→ read full articleIn Search of the Sacred: Pico Iyer on Our Models of Paradise
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
23 Sep 2024
With these human minds, arising from these material bodies, we keep trying to find heaven — to make heaven — in our myths and our mundanities, right here in the place where we are: in this beautiful and troubled world.
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How to Bless Each Other: Poet and Philosopher John O’Donohue on the Light within Us and between Us
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
16 Sep 2024
Every once in the bluest moon, if you are lucky, you encounter someone with such powerful and generous light in their eyes that they rekindle the lost light within you and return it magnified.
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From the Labor Camp to the Pantheon of Literature: How Dostoyevsky Became a Writer
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
9 Sep 2024
Fyodor Dostoyevsky was twenty-seven when he was arrested and sentenced to death for belonging to a literary society deemed dangerous by the tsarist regime. His sentence was repealed at the last moment.
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You and the Universe: N.J. Berrill’s Poetic 1958 Masterpiece of Cosmic Perspective
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
2 Sep 2024
Before we set foot on the Moon and sent rovers to Mars, before we built supercolliders to search for the “God particle” and heard the sound of spacetime in a gravitational wave, marine biologist N.J. Berrill took up the eternal question of how to harmonize our cosmic smallness with the immensity of our creaturely experience.
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Neruda’s Beautiful, Humanistic Nobel Literature Prize Acceptance Speech
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
26 Aug 2024
On 13 Dec 1971, Pablo Neruda took the podium in Stockholm to deliver an extraordinary acceptance speech that begins with a lyrical recollection of his 1948 escape to Argentina when Chile’s dictatorial government issued an order for his arrest.
→ read full articleUrsula K. Le Guin on Growing Older and What Beauty Really Means
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
19 Aug 2024
Cats know exactly where they begin and end. When they walk slowly out the door that you are holding open for them, and pause, leaving their tail just an inch or two inside the door, they know it. They know you have to keep holding the door open. That is why their tail is there. It is a cat’s way of maintaining a relationship.
→ read full articleWhat Makes Life Alive: Vassily Grossman on Consciousness, Freedom, and Kindness
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
12 Aug 2024
“Every thing that lives is holy, life delights in life,” William Blake wrote in an era when science first began raising questions with spiritual undertones: What is life? Where does it begin and end? What makes it alive?
→ read full articleThe Ocean and the Meaning of Life
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
12 Aug 2024
The book, The Edge of the Sea, was an ambitious guide to the seashore — the place where Carson found “a sense of the unhurried deliberation of earth processes that move with infinite leisure, with all eternity at their disposal.”
→ read full articleThe Beach and the Soul: Anne Morrow Lindbergh on the Benedictions of the Sea
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
5 Aug 2024
“No one could write truthfully about the sea and leave out the poetry.” Because the beach is where the body meets the sea, it is a place of encounter with the native poetry of the soul.
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200 Years of Solitude: Great Writers, Artists, and Scientists on the Creative and Spiritual Rewards of Fertile Aloneness
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
29 Jul 2024
There is a silence at the center of each person — an untrammeled space where the inner voice grows free to speak. That space expands in solitude. To create anything — a poem, a painting, a theorem — is to find the voice in the silence that has something to say to the world. In solitude, …
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The Ecstasy of Eternity: Richard Jefferies on Time and Self-Transcendence
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
22 Jul 2024
Realising that spirit, recognising my own inner consciousness, the psyche, so clearly, I cannot understand time. It is eternity now. I am in the midst of it. It is about me in the sunshine; I am in it, as the butterfly floats in the light-laden air. Nothing has to come; it is now. Now is eternity; now is the immortal life.
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Change: The Paradoxes and Possibilities of Transformation
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
8 Jul 2024
Adam Phillips on Our Ambivalent Desire for Change: Are you the same person you were as a child?
→ read full articleBetween Mathematics and the Miraculous: The Stunning Pendulum Drawings of Swiss Healer and Artist Emma Kunz
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
1 Jul 2024
As a schoolchild, she had delighted in using a pendulum to make drawings in her exercise books, but it was not until midlife that she found in this process a portal to a larger world of ideas. In 1938, using a silver pendulum with a jade end, she believed was guided by energy fields, she began making large-scale drawings.
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The Story Behind Dylan Thomas’ “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night” and the Poet’s Own Stirring Reading of His Masterpiece
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
24 Jun 2024
Written in 1947, Thomas’s masterpiece was published for the first time 1951. In the fall of the following year he drank himself into a coma while on a reading and lecture tour in North America.
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On Growing Old, the Perils of Success, and the Secret of Remaining Young at Heart
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
17 Jun 2024
Henry Miller on the Measure of a Life Well Lived
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The Flower and the Meaning of Life: Emily Dickinson, Michael Pollan, and The Little Prince
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
3 Jun 2024
“To be a flower,” Emily Dickinson wrote, “is profound Responsibility.” A century later, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry made his hero’s central preoccupation the responsibility for a single flower — the Little Prince’s beloved rose.
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The Healing Power of Nature and Beauty: Florence Nightingale on Expediting Recovery from Illness and Burnout
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
27 May 2024
“I cannot say exactly how nature exerts its calming and organizing effects on our brains,” the poetic neurologist Oliver Sacks wrote, “but I have seen in my patients the restorative and healing powers of nature and gardens, even for those who are deeply disabled neurologically.”
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Hermann Hesse on Hope, the Difficult Art of Taking Responsibility, and the Wisdom of the Inner Voice
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
20 May 2024
“Character — the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life — is the source from which self-respect springs,” Joan Didion wrote in her timeless essay on self-respect.
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The Invention of Zero: How Ancient Mesopotamia Created the Mathematical Concept of Nought and Ancient India Gave It Symbolic Form
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
13 May 2024
If the ancient Arab world had closed its gates to foreign travelers, we would have no medicine, no astronomy, and no mathematics — at least not as we know them today. Central to humanity’s quest to grasp the nature of the universe and make sense of our own existence is zero.
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Trial, Triumph, and the Art of the Possible: The Remarkable Story Behind Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy”
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
13 May 2024
On the early evening of May 7, 1824, the Viennese crowded into the concert hall — but they were not the usual patrons. Looking up to the royal box, Beethoven was crushed to see it empty. He was going to be playing for the people.
→ read full articleA Poet and a Geologist’s Love Letter to Life Lensed Through a Mountain
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
6 May 2024
How astonishing to remember that nothing has inherent color, that color is not a property of objects but of the light that falls upon them, reflected back. So too with the light of the mind — it is attention that gives the world its vibrancy, its kaleidoscopic beauty.
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What It Takes to Grow: Pioneering Psychoanalyst Karen Horney on the Key to Self-Realization
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
22 Apr 2024
The measure of growth is not how much we have changed, but how harmoniously we have integrated our changes with all the selves we have been — those vessels of personhood stacked within the current self.
→ read full articleCarl Jung’s Legacy and the Countercultural Courage to Reclaim the Human in a Posthuman Age
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
8 Apr 2024
Between Psyche and Cyborg – The technosphere now overlays the ecosphere and we cannot help but inhale its post-industrial gases. Virtuality has begun to displace reality, making the ground of human existence hard to discern… in today’s technocratic cult of posthumanism.
→ read full articleLove Anyway
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
1 Apr 2024
You know that the price of life is death, that the price of love is loss, and still you watch the golden afternoon light fall on a face you love, knowing that the light will soon fade, knowing that the loving face too will one day fade to indifference or bone, but you love anyway.
→ read full articleGardening as Resistance: Notes on Building Paradise
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
25 Mar 2024
“The gardener digs in another time, without past or future, beginning or end… Here is the Amen beyond the prayer,” Derek Jarman wrote as he grieved his dying friends, faced his own death, and contemplated art, mortality, and resistance.
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Life Is like Blue Jelly: Margaret Mead Discovers the Meaning of Existence in a Dream
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
18 Mar 2024
The meaning of life has been contemplated by just about every thinking, feeling, breathing human being, and memorably so by a number of cultural icons, including…
→ read full articleMay Sarton on the Art of Living Alone
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
11 Mar 2024
Solitude is the seedbed of creativity. Living alone can be deeply rewarding and challenging. It is not for everyone. It is not for those who romanticize its offerings of freedom and focus, but excise its menacing visitations of loneliness and alienation.
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Hermann Hesse on Discovering the Soul Beneath the Self and the Key to Finding Peace
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
4 Mar 2024
We call this consciousness, this higher unity of personhood, soul.
→ read full articleWhen Things Fall Apart: Tibetan Buddhist Nun and Teacher Pema Chödrön on Transformation through Difficult Times
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
26 Feb 2024
In every life, there comes a time when we are razed to the bone of our resilience by losses beyond our control — lacerations of the heart that feel barely bearable, that leave us bereft of solid ground. What then?
→ read full articleTim Ferriss on How He Survived Suicidal Depression and His Tools for Warding Off the Darkness
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
5 Feb 2024
Tim Ferris is the amicable, quick-witted, high-energy writer, adventurer, and interviewer devoted to optimizing human performance on physical and mental health. But in addition to nearly dying at birth and growing up with no material luxury, Tim survived a period of suicidal depression that nearly claimed his life
→ read full articleThe Art of Solitude: Buddhist Scholar and Teacher Stephen Batchelor on Contemplative Practice and Creativity
Maria Popova | The Marginalian - TRANSCEND Media Service,
29 Jan 2024
“Give me solitude,” Whitman demanded in his ode to the eternal tension between city and soul, “give me again O Nature your primal sanities!”
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Choose Kindness
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
1 Jan 2024
The kinder and the more thoughtful a person is, the more kindness he can find in other people.
— Leo Tolstoy
How to Bless Each Other: Poet and Philosopher John O’Donohue on the Light Within Us and Between Us
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
18 Dec 2023
Every once in the bluest moon, if you are lucky, you encounter someone with such powerful and generous light in their eyes that they rekindle the lost light within you and return it magnified.
→ read full articleAn Introvert’s Field Guide to Friendship: Thoreau on the Challenges and Rewards of the Art of Connection
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
11 Dec 2023
Friendship is the sunshine of life — the quiet radiance that makes our lives not only livable but worth living.
→ read full articleWhat Happens When We Die
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
4 Dec 2023
Here we are, each of us a trembling totality, made of particles both absolutely vulnerable and absolutely indestructible, hungering for absolutes in a universe of relatives, hungering for permanence in a universe of ceaseless change, famished for meaning, for beauty, for emblems of existence.
→ read full articleNecessary Losses: The Life-Shaping Art of Letting Go
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
27 Nov 2023
All of our creativity, all of our compulsive productivity, all of our poems and our space telescopes, are but a coping mechanism for our mortality, for the elemental knowledge that we will lose everything and everyone we cherish as we inevitably return our borrowed stardust to the universe.
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Lucille Clifton on the Balance of Intellect and Intuition in Creative Work and the Healing Power of Connection
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
20 Nov 2023
How to Be a Living Poem
→ read full articleAlain de Botton on the Qualities of a Healthy Mind
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
13 Nov 2023
“The mind is its own place, and in it self can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n,” Milton wrote centuries before modern science came to illuminate how the mind renders reality — the mind, this sole lens we have on what the world is and what we are.
→ read full articleHow the Forgotten Prodigy William James Sidis Presaged the Quantum Undoing of Time and Thermodynamics
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
6 Nov 2023
Dismantling the Dogmas of Life and Death
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How to Own Your Weakness: Alan Watts on the Confucian Concept of Jen and the Dangers of Self-Righteousness
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
23 Oct 2023
A great tragedy of our time, this epoch of self-righteousness, is the zeal with which people would rather feel right than understand — the situation, the context, the motives and vulnerabilities behind the actions, the basic fact of the other.
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“Little Prince” Author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, the Sahara Desert, and the Meaning of Life
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
16 Oct 2023
In Dec1940, two years before he created ‘The Little Prince’ and four years before he disappeared over the Bay of Biscay, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry began writing ‘Letter to a Hostage’ while waiting in Portugal for admission into the USA.
→ read full articleThe Geometry of Grief: A Mathematician on How Fractals Can Help Us Fathom Loss and Reorient to the Ongoingness of Life
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
9 Oct 2023
To live at all, however long or short, is an unbidden bargain to lose everything you hold precious: every love and every life, including your own. Loss is the price of life–a price not merely worth paying but beyond questions of worth and why.
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The Courage to Be Yourself: Virginia Woolf on How to Hear Your Soul
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
2 Oct 2023
It is an ongoing mystery: What makes you and your childhood self the same person. Across a lifetime of physiological and psychological change, some center holds.
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Atom and Identity: Bridging Eastern Philosophy and Western Science to Illuminate Consciousness
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
2 Oct 2023
The Atom and the Doctrine of Identity: Quantum Pioneer Erwin Schrödinger on Bridging Eastern Philosophy and Western Science to Illuminate Consciousness
→ read full articleConsciousness and the Nature of the Universe: Panpsychism in the Ongoing Mystery of What We Are
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
25 Sep 2023
Coined in the sixteenth century by the Italian philosopher and proto-scientist Francesco Patrizi, whose work inspired Galileo, panpsychism is the idea that all matter is endowed with the capacity for subjective experience of immaterial quality — the sort of experience we call, in its expression familiar to us, consciousness.
→ read full articleHow to Live in Light: A Blind Hero of the French Resistance on Seeing the Heart of Life and Contacting the Oneness of Being
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
18 Sep 2023
“To see takes time, like to have a friend takes time,” Georgia O’Keeffe wrote as she contemplated the art of seeing just before the Little Prince sighed his timeless sigh: “What is essential is invisible to the eye.”
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Notes on Complexity: A Buddhist Scientist on the Murmuration of Being
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
18 Sep 2023
The Buddhist scientist Neil Theise endeavors to bridge the mystery out there with the mystery of us, bringing together our three primary instruments of investigating reality: empirical science, philosophy, and metaphysics.
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What Makes You Makes the Universe: Nobel Laureate Erwin Schrödinger on Quantum Physics, Vedanta, and the Ongoing Mystery of What We Are
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
11 Sep 2023
To face the question of what makes us who we are with courage, lucidity, and fullness of feeling is to face, with all the restlessness and helplessness this stirs in the meaning-hungry soul, the elemental fact of our choicelessness in the conditions that lead to our existence.
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Dostoyevsky on Animal Rights and the Deepest Meaning of Human Love
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
28 Aug 2023
Love every leaf… Love the animals, the plants, love everything. If you love everything, you will perceive the divine mystery in things. Once you have perceived it, you will begin to comprehend it better every day, and you will come at last to love the world with an all-embracing love.
→ read full articleHow to Say Goodbye: An Illustrated Field Guide to Accompanying a Loved One at the End of Life
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
21 Aug 2023
To comprehend the luckiness of death is to comprehend life itself. When a loved one is dying and we get to be by their side, it is a double luckiness — lucky that we got to have the love at all, and lucky, which is not everyone’s luck, that we get to say goodbye.
→ read full article“Little Women” Author Louisa May Alcott on the Creative Rewards of Being Single
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
14 Aug 2023
“Liberty is a better husband than love.”
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How to Keep Criticism from Sinking Your Soul: Walt Whitman and the Discipline of Creative Confidence
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
7 Aug 2023
“Re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul,” Walt Whitman wrote in the preface to Leaves of Grass. “I do not trouble my spirit to vindicate itself or be understood.”
→ read full articleA Shelter in Time: John Berger on the Power of Music
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
17 Jul 2023
“Songs are like rivers: each follows its own course, yet all flow to the sea, from which everything came.”
→ read full articleThe Universe and the Soul: Richard Jefferies on Nature as Prayer for Presence
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
10 Jul 2023
How to grow “absorbed into the being or existence of the universe.”
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The Art of Human Connection: Pioneering Psychologist and Philosopher William James on the Most Important Attitude for Relationships
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
26 Jun 2023
To be human is to continually mistake our frames of reference for reality itself. “Neither the whole of truth nor the whole of good is revealed to any single observer.”
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A New Refutation of Time: Borges on the Most Paradoxical Dimension of Existence
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
19 Jun 2023
“Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire.”
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Consciousness, Artificial Intelligence, and Our Search for Meaning: Oliver Sacks on ChatGPT, 30 Years before ChatGPT
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
22 May 2023
“We read excitedly of the latest chemical, computational, or quantum theory of mind, and then ask, ‘Is that all there is to it?’”
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The Heart of Matter: Pierre Teilhard de Chardin on Bridging the Scientific and the Sacred
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
15 May 2023
“Blessed be you, mighty matter, irresistible march of evolution, reality ever new-born; you who, by constantly shattering our mental categories, force us to go ever further and further in our pursuit of the truth.”
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Dostoyevsky on Animal Rights and the Deepest Meaning of Human Love
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
1 May 2023
“Treasure this ecstasy; however absurd people may think it.”
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Lichens and the Meaning of Life
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
17 Apr 2023
We Are Lichens on a Grand Scale
→ read full articleAn Introvert’s Field Guide to Friendship: Thoreau on the Challenges and Rewards of the Art of Connection
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
17 Apr 2023
“We only need to be as true to others as we are to ourselves that there may be ground enough for friendship.”
→ read full articleHow to Bear Your Loneliness: Grounding Wisdom from the Great Buddhist Teacher Pema Chödrön
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
10 Apr 2023
“We are cheating ourselves when we run away from the ambiguity of loneliness.”
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2,000 Years of Kindness
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
3 Apr 2023
From Marcus Aurelius to Einstein, poets and philosophers on the deepest wellspring of our humanity.
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God, Human, Animal, Machine: Consciousness and Our Search for Meaning in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
3 Apr 2023
An inquiry into the eternal enchantment of why the world exists.
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The Transcendent Brain: The Poetic Physicist Alan Lightman on Spirituality for the Science-Spirited
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
27 Mar 2023
A largehearted invitation to “stand on the precipice between the known and the unknown, without fear, without anxiety, but instead with awe and wonder at this strange and beautiful cosmos we find ourselves in.”
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How to Survive Hopelessness
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
27 Mar 2023
“You can expect good and bad luck, but good or bad judgment is your prerogative.”
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Bertrand Russell on the Secret of Happiness
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
20 Mar 2023
“Let your interests be as wide as possible, and let your reactions to the things and persons that interest you be as far as possible friendly rather than hostile.”
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Against the Cult of Originality: Emerson on the True Nature of Genius
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
13 Mar 2023
The best things in life we don’t choose — they choose us. A great love, a great calling, a great illumination — they happen unto us, like light falling upon that which is lit. We have given a name to these unbidden greatnesses — genius, from the Latin for “spirit,” denoting the spirit of a universe we can only submit to but cannot govern.
→ read full articleThe Vital Difference between Work and Labor: Lewis Hyde on Sustaining the Creative Spirit
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
6 Mar 2023
“The gifts of the inner world must be accepted as gifts in the outer world if they are to retain their vitality.”
→ read full articleHow to Be with Each Other’s Suffering: Elie Wiesel on the Antidote to Our Paralysis in the Face of World-Overwhelm
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
27 Feb 2023
“I believe if people talk, and they talk sincerely, with the same respect that one owes to a close friend or to God, something will come out of that, something good. I would call it presence.”
→ read full articleHow to Be Less Harsh with Yourself (and Others): Ram Dass on the Spiritual Lessons of Trees
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
20 Feb 2023
A simple perspective shift that reorients the roots of being. Hermann Hesse believed that trees are our greatest spiritual teachers. Walt Whitman cherished them as paragons of authenticity amid a world of mere appearances.
→ read full articleRising Strong: Brené Brown on the Physics of Vulnerability and What Resilient People Have in Common
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
13 Feb 2023
“If we are brave enough often enough, we will fall; this is the physics of vulnerability.”
→ read full articleA Winter Walk with Thoreau: The Transcendentalist Way of Finding Inner Warmth in the Cold Season
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
6 Feb 2023
“Take long walks in stormy weather or through deep snows in the fields and woods, if you would keep your spirits up. Deal with brute nature. Be cold and hungry and weary.”
→ read full articleA Responsibility to Wonder: Pioneering Neuroscientist Charles Scott Sherrington on the Spirituality of Nature
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
30 Jan 2023
“We have, because human, an inalienable prerogative of responsibility which we cannot devolve…not… even upon the stars. We can share it only with each other.”
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The Tragic Miracle of Consciousness: John Steinbeck on the True Meaning and Purpose of Hope
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
23 Jan 2023
“Hope is a diagnostic human trait and this simple cortex symptom seems to be a prime factor in our inspection of our universe.”
→ read full articleThe Seamstress Who Solved the Ancient Mystery of the Argonaut, Pioneered the Aquarium, and Laid the Groundwork for the Study of Octopus Intelligence
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
9 Jan 2023
But after repeating her experiment for five years and obtaining the same result over and over, Jeanne Villepreux-Power demonstrated that the octopus is indeed this planet’s patron saint of the possible.
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The Four Desires Driving All Human Behavior: Bertrand Russell’s Magnificent Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
2 Jan 2023
Bertrand Russell (May 18, 1872–February 2, 1970) endures as one of humanity’s most lucid and luminous minds — an oracle of timeless wisdom on everything.
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The Four Buddhist Mantras for Turning Fear into Love–>Thich Nhat Hanh
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
2 Jan 2023
“When you love someone, the best thing you can offer that person is your presence.”
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The Poetic Science of the Aurora Borealis
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
19 Dec 2022
“And now commenced a display which baffles all description.”
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A Stoic’s Key to Peace of Mind: Seneca on the Antidote to Anxiety
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
5 Dec 2022
“There are more things … likely to frighten us than there are to crush us; we suffer more often in imagination than in reality. The truth is, we know so little about life, we don’t really know what the good news is and what the bad news is.” — Kurt Vonnegut
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Ursula K. Le Guin on Suffering and Getting to the Other Side of Pain
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
21 Nov 2022
“All you have is what you are, and what you give.”
→ read full articleTrial, Triumph, and the Art of the Possible: The Remarkable Story behind Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy”
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
14 Nov 2022
A hymn of rage, a hymn of redemption, and a timeless love letter to the possible.
→ read full article16 Life-Learnings from 16 Years of The Marginalian
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
24 Oct 2022
23 Oct 2022 – The Marginalian was born as a plain-text newsletter to seven friends on October 23, 2006, under the outgrown name Brain Pickings. Reflections on keeping the soul intact and alive and worthy of itself.
→ read full articleThe Everlasting Wonder of Being: How a Cold Cosmos Kindles the Glow of Consciousness
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
3 Oct 2022
How we went from quanta packages to the laughter of children on a summer afternoon.
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The Mirror of Enigmas: Chance, the Universe, and the Fragile Loveliness of Knowing Who We Are
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
26 Sep 2022
“There is no human being on earth capable of declaring with certitude who he is.” It takes a great sobriety of spirit to know your own depths — and your limits. It takes a special grandeur of spirit to know the limits of your self-knowledge. (Jorge Luis Borges)
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Keith Haring on Our Resistance to Change, the Dangers of Certainty, and the Root of Creativity
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
19 Sep 2022
“To be a victim of change is to ignore its existence. It is almost banal to say so yet it needs to be stressed continually: all is creation, all is change, all is flux, all is metamorphosis,” — Henry Miller
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The Art of Choosing Love over Not-Love: Rumi’s Antidote to Our Human Tragedy
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
12 Sep 2022
“You’ll long for me when I’m gone… You’ll kiss the headstone of my grave… Kiss my face instead!”
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How to Keep Life from Becoming a Parody of Itself: Simone de Beauvoir on the Art of Growing Older
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
22 Aug 2022
“In old age we should wish still to have passions strong enough to prevent us turning in on ourselves.”
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Life and Death and More Life: Leo Tolstoy on Science, Spirituality, and Our Search for Meaning
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
15 Aug 2022
“A caterpillar sees itself shrivel up, but doesn’t see the butterfly which flies out of it.” “How can a creature who will certainly die have an understanding of things that will exist forever?”
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The Bittersweet Story of the Real-Life Peaceful Bull Who Inspired Munro Leaf and Robert Lawson’s Ferdinand
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
1 Aug 2022
A journey to the abyss between the real world and the ideal world, and a romp across our mightiest bridge between the two.
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Herman Melville’s Passionate, Beautiful, Heartbreaking Love Letters to Nathaniel Hawthorne
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
20 Jun 2022
“Your heart beat in my ribs and mine in yours, and both in God’s… The divine magnet is in you, and my magnet responds.”
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Trial, Triumph, and the Art of the Possible: The Remarkable Story behind Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy”
Maria Popova | The Marginalian – TRANSCEND Media Service,
6 Jun 2022
A hymn of rage, a hymn of redemption, and a timeless love letter to the possible.
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