Maria Popova Quotes & Sayings

Greatness is consistency driven by a deep love of the work. — Maria Popova

What is needed isn't merely tolerance but acceptance, wholehearted and unconditional. — Maria Popova

Most of us live our lives desperately trying to conceal the anguishing gap between our polished, aspirational, representational selves and our real, human, deeply flawed selves. Dunham lives hers in that gap, welcomes the rest of the world into it with boundless openheartedness, and writes about it with the kind of profound self-awareness and self-compassion that invite us to inhabit our own gaps and maybe even embrace them a little bit more, anguish over them a little bit less. — Maria Popova

Presence is far more intricate and rewarding an art than productivity. — Maria Popova

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

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

I have bad days. Sometimes I have a lot of bad days. By and large, I think most people fall into a bad mood because they're able to ruminate on whatever the problem at hand is, and that makes it worse. But when you intercept the rumination process with something that requires your full attention - that's stimulating and absorbing, that places a demand on your intellectual focus - you don't get to ruminate. In a way, it's a mental health aid to be able to do that so much. My routine, what I do, it just feels like home. It's my comfort food. — Maria Popova

Be curious. Be constantly, consistently, indiscriminatel y curious. — Maria Popova

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

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

Build pockets of stillness into your life. — Maria Popova

Curation is more than packaging-it is to help readers [discern] what is important in the world. — Maria Popova

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

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

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

Life is a continual process of arrival into who we are. — Maria Popova

Leaving love behind is never easy, for it also asks that we leave behind the part of ourselves that did the loving. And yet for all but the very fortunate and the very foolish, this difficult transition is an inevitable part of the human experience, of the ceaseless learning journey that is life - because, after all, anything worth pursuing is worth failing at, and fail we do as we pursue. — Maria Popova

Curation is a form of pattern recognition - pieces of information or insight which over time amount to an implicit point of view. — Maria Popova

Universal WiFi. Without a doubt. I am done with being on the train, not having internet. Or having spotty coverage. It's a fundamental need at this point. It's the frickin' information age! It should be like air! And it doesn't have to be free. I'm a believer in paying for value. Just having it as an option. — Maria Popova

Elegant and lucid ... a pitch-perfect clarion call, issued not with preachy hubris but from a deep place of humility, for awakening to the greatest rewards of living ... The Road to Character is an essential read in its entirety-Anne Lamott with a harder edge of moral philosophy, Seneca with a softer edge of spiritual sensitivity, E. F. Schumacher for perplexed moderns. — Maria Popova

So depending on the day, my schedule is different. But, generally speaking, I get up in the morning, I do a 30 to 45 minute prescheduling of tweets and just seeing if there's anything urgent - do-or-die emails or server outages, stuff like that. Then after that I go to the gym, where I do all my long-form reading - so Instapaper, and all the Kindle books. I go through an embarrassing amount of books per week. — Maria Popova

Be generous with your time and your resources and with giving credit and, especially, with your words. It's so much easier to be a critic than a celebrator. Always remember there is a human being on the other end of every exchange and behind every cultural artifact being critiqued. To understand and be understood, those are among life's greatest gifts, and every interaction is an opportunity to exchange them. — Maria Popova

Guilt is the flip side of prestige and they're both horrible reasons to do something. — Maria Popova

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

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