Maria Popova    Loving is perennial vivification... a centrifugal act of the soul in constant flux that goes toward the object and envelops it in warm corroboration, uniting us with it and positively affirming its being.

Maria Popova    Each time I see a sparrow inside an airport, I am seized with tenderness for the bird, for living so acutely and concretely a paradox that haunts our human lives in myriad guises the difficulty of discerning comfort from entrapment, freedom from peril. It is a paradox rooted in the early...

Maria Popova    Hearing the rising tide, Rachel Carson wrote in her poetic meditation on the ocean and the meaning of life, there are echoes of past and future: of the flow of time, obliterating yet containing all that has gone before of the stream of life, flowing as inexorably as any ocean current, from past...

Maria Popova    Experiences of shame throw a flooding light on what and who we are and what the world we live in is.

Maria Popova    Despite what dictionaries would have us believe, this world is still mostly undefined.

Maria Popova    There’s no place like home, Dorothy sighs in The Wizard of Oz. But home is not a place it is a locus of longing, always haunted by our existential homelessness. Welcome home a cheaply suited broker once exclaimed at me, swinging open the door to a tiny studio as my foot fell on the beige wall...

Maria Popova    We ought to dance with rapture that we should be alive and in the flesh, and part of the living, incarnate cosmos.

Maria Popova    How, knowing that even the universe is dying, do we bear our lives Most readily, through friendship, through connection, through co creating the world we want to live in for the brief time we have together on this lonely, perfect planet. The seventh annual Universe in Verse a many hearted labor...

Maria Popova    It began as an almost inaudible hum...

Maria Popova    If it comes, it comes; if it does not come, no process of reasoning can force it. Yet it transforms the value of the creature loved.

Maria Popova    A reanimated world is one in which spirit and matter are not just equally regarded but recognized as mutually dependent.

Maria Popova    At its best, an intimate relationship is a symbiote of mutual nourishment a portable ecosystem of interdependent growth, undergirded by a mycelial web of trust and tenderness. One is profoundly changed by it and yet becomes more purely oneself as projections give way to presence and complexes are...

Maria Popova    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, and you love anyway because life is...

Maria Popova    Poetry is the cosmos awakened to itself.

Maria Popova    It is when the experience of powerlessness is at its most acute, when history seems at its most bleak, that the determination to think like a human being, creatively, courageously, and complicatedly, matters the most.

Maria Popova    A version of this essay appeared in The New York Times Book Review. A cloud is a spell against indifference, an emblem of the water cycle that makes this planet a living world capable of trees and tenderness, a great cosmic gasp at the improbability that such a world exists, that across the cold...

Maria Popova    At the end of my life, I know I won’t be wishing I’d held more back, been less effusive, more often stood on ceremony, forgiven less, spent more days oblivious to the secret wishes and fears of the people around me.

Maria Popova    It is likely that fungi have been manipulating animal minds for much of the time that there have been minds to manipulate.

Maria Popova    Every night, for every human being that ever was and ever will be, the Moon rises to remind us how improbably lucky we are, each of its craters a monument of the odds we prevailed against to exist, a reliquary of the violent collisions that forged our rocky planet lush with life and tore from its...

Maria Popova    Our task at midlife is to be strong enough to relinquish the ego urgencies of the first half and open ourselves to a greater wonder.