Top 80 Maria Popova Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “To understand and be understood, those are among life’s greatest gifts, and every interaction is an opportunity to exchange them.”

— Maria Popova

2. “Life is a continual process of arrival into who we are.”

— Maria Popova

3. “We are a collage of our interests, our influences, our inspirations, all the fragmentary impressions we’ve collected by being alive and awake to the world. Who we are is simply a finely-curated catalogue of those.”

— Maria Popova

4. “Be curious. Be constantly, consistently, indiscriminatel y curious.”

— Maria Popova

5. “Presence is far more intricate and rewarding an art than productivity.”

— Maria Popova

Featured in: Productivity Quotes

6. “Curation is a form of pattern recognition – pieces of information or insight which over time amount to an implicit point of view.”

— Maria Popova

7. “In order for us to truly create and contribute to the world, we have to be able to connect countless dots, to cross-pollinate ideas from a wealth of disciplines, to combine and recombine these pieces and build new castles.”

— Maria Popova

8. “Because it is possible to create – creating one’s self, willing to be one’s self – one has anxiety. One would have no anxiety if there were no possibility whatever.”

— Maria Popova

9. “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.”

— Maria Popova

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

— Maria Popova

11. “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.”

— Maria Popova

12. “Build pockets of stillness into your life.”

— Maria Popova

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

— Maria Popova

14. “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.”

— Maria Popova

15. “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.”

— Maria Popova

16. “History is not what happened, but what survives the shipwrecks of judgment and chance.”

— Maria Popova

17. “There are really cool or funny videos, or visually stunning photos, and that’s fine, but none of them really give you more when you close that tab, you know? I try to find stuff that a little bit, in a tiny way changes how you see something about the world.”

— Maria Popova

18. “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.”

— Maria Popova

19. “Behind each door of what-if lies an unanswerable question that unhinges an infinite Rube Goldberg machine of probabilities. The life we have is the only one we will ever know, and even that with tenuous certainty.”

— Maria Popova

20. “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.”

— Maria Popova

21. “Every voracious reader knows that there is no Dewey system for the Babel of the mind. You walk amid the labyrinthine stacks and ideas leap at you like dust bunnies drawn from the motes that cover a great many different books ready long ago.”

— Maria Popova

22. “What I pick for my blog and what I pick for Twitter are different things. One thing that is true for both, by and large, is that it has to feel like something that leaves you with more than just a moment of gawking.”

— Maria Popova

23. “We are who we are in large part because of where we are and when we are. But lives of courage and consequence remap the locus of spirit and possibility for generations to come.”

— Maria Popova

24. “I think you need to be a little in love – not necessarily in a romantic sense, although that helps – but to be in love with the reality of your own life.”

— Maria Popova

25. “What is needed isn’t merely tolerance but acceptance, wholehearted and unconditional.”

— Maria Popova

26. “You enrich people with creative resources, and over time, these Lego bricks that end up in their heads eventually build this enormous, incredible castle.”

— Maria Popova

27. “It is a beautiful impulse to contain the infinite in the finite, to rest order from the chaos, to construct a foothold so we may climb towards higher truth. It is also a limiting one, for in naming things we often come to mistake the names for the things themselves.”

— Maria Popova

28. “I will die, you will die the atoms that huddled for a cosmic blink around a shadow of a self will return to the seas that made us. What will survive of us are shores seeds and stardust.”

— Maria Popova

29. “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.”

— Maria Popova

30. “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.”

— Maria Popova

31. “Whatever we may mean by the word “love,” we earn the right to use it only by doing the hard work of knowing and being known.”

— Maria Popova

32. “Literature is the original Internet – every footnote, every citation, every allusion is essentially a hyperlink to another text, to another mind.”

— Maria Popova

33. “Lives interweave with other lives, and out of the tapestry arise hints at answers to questions that raze to the bone of life: What are the building blocks of character, of contentment, of lasting achievement? How does a person come into self-possession and sovereignty of mind against the tide of convention and unreasoning collectivism? Does genius suffice for happiness, does distinction, does love?”

— Maria Popova

34. “Kepler knew what we habitually forget – that the locus of possibility expands when the unimaginable is imagined and then made real through systematic effort.”

— Maria Popova

35. “But most weeks I’ve gone through 12 books, maybe even 15 some weeks, depending on the length. So I go through my long form, and then my day begins. I usually try to do most of my writing earlier in the day because I sort of lump out later on.”

— Maria Popova

36. “It is not cowardice but courage to acknowledge the superior role chance plays in steering the course of life, and at the same time to take responsibility for the margin of difference our personal choices do make within the parameters of chance.”

— Maria Popova

37. “Decrying the sublimation of women’s minds to domesticity, Fuller asserts that “a house is no home unless it contain food and fire for the mind as well as for the body” and admonishes that “human beings are not so constituted that they can live without expansion.”

— Maria Popova

38. “Artist Allen Crawford brings Whitman’s undying text to new life in gorgeous hand-lettering and illustrations, transforming the 60-page poem originally published in 1855 as the centerpiece of Leaves of Grass into a breathtaking 256-page piece of art.”

— Maria Popova

39. “The real wealth of the Nation lies in the resources of the earth – soil, water, forests, minerals, and wildlife. To utilize them for present needs while insuring their preservation for future generations requires a delicately balanced and continuing program, based on the most extensive research. Their administration is not properly, and cannot be, a matter of politics.”

— Maria Popova

40. “I didn’t really – at least intellectually and creatively – have a particularly compelling experience in college. But during my junior year, they made the TED talks public. So I started listening to them. They were producing one per day, and I was listening to one per day, every day, at the gym.”

— Maria Popova

41. “Beyond any human lifetime, and often within it, what is recorded is what is remembered, the records gradually displacing the actuality of lived events. And what is recorded is a fraction of what is thought, felt, acted out, lived – a fraction at best edited by the very act of its selection, at worst warped by rationalization or fictionalized by a deliberate retelling of reality.”

— Maria Popova

42. “In science as in romance, the unknown is disrobed sheath by sheath as fervid fantasies imagine the possibilities conquerable by knowledge – fantasies that far outstrip the reality eventually revealed as knowledge progresses.”

— Maria Popova

43. “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.”

— Maria Popova

44. “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.”

— Maria Popova

45. “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.”

— Maria Popova

46. “What is love, after all, if not an affectionate acceptance of the lover’s full spectrum of being, the silly along with the solemn?”

— Maria Popova

47. “Nobody knows what goes on between two hearts including, more often than not, the people in whose chests they beat.”

— Maria Popova

48. “Those marginalized for one aspect of their nature are bound to have sympathies with those marginalized for another, but no marginalized group moves to the center solely by its own efforts – such is the paradox of power. It takes a gravitational pull by those kindred to the cause who are already in relative positions of power or privilege.”

— Maria Popova

49. “Those accustomed to hard work and self-propulsion, who have risen to the zenith of accomplishment by force of will and magnitude of effort, are most susceptible to the supreme self-damnation of human life – the belief that love is something to be earned by striving rather than something that comes unbidden like a shepherd’s song on a summer evening in the mountains of Bulgaria.”

— Maria Popova

50. “We are always harshest upon those foibles we see in others that we know bedevil our own natures – the ones that most gravely misbecome our self image – for blame is always easier than shame.”

— Maria Popova