The Marginalian

Hello, I'm Maria Popova, and Brain Pickings is my heartfelt project dedicated to exploring what it truly means to live a meaningful and joyful life. I started this journey in 2006 as a weekly email to just seven friends. Over time, it grew into an online platform, and it is now part of the permanent web archive at the Library of Congress. Brain Pickings serves as a reflection of my personal growth—intellectually, creatively, spiritually, and poetically—drawing insights from literature, science, art, philosophy, and various aspects of human thought and emotion. It is a personal exploration fueled by the fundamental questions and the deep sense of wonder that connects us all.

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Václav Havel on How to Live with Your Greatest Failure

4 days ago | themarginalian.org | Maria Popova

Few things in life are more devastating than to give something your all and still fail. Not the “fail better” of startup culture, not the “fail forward” of self-help, not the failure that is childhood’s fulcrum of learning, not the inspired mistakes that propel creative risk, but simply that helpless and harrowing moment when you face the abyss between your will and your powers, your values and your choices, your ideal self and your real self. It is without redemption, such failure.
Ocean Vuong on Anger

1 week ago | themarginalian.org | Maria Popova

“To be an artist is a guarantee to your fellow humans that the wear and tear of living will not let you become a murderer,” Louise Bourgeois wrote in her diary as a young artist. “The poets (by which I mean all artists),” James Baldwin wrote in his late thirties, “are finally the only people who know the truth about us. Soldiers don’t. Statesmen don’t… Only poets.” And the truth about us, as I know it, is that how we love, how we give, and how we suffer is just about the sum of who we are.
The Alchemy of Heartbreak and How to Live with Unrequited Love: The Story Behind Emily Dickinson’s “Hope Is the Thing with Feathers”

1 week ago | themarginalian.org | Maria Popova

This essay is adapted from the nineteenth chapter of my book Figuring. In the first autumn of her thirties, Emily Dickinson wrote to her confidante and eventual editor Thomas Wentworth Higginson:I had a terror — since September — I could tell to none, and so I sing, as the Boy does by the Burying Ground — because I am afraid. Not a “fright,” not a “shock,” but a terror. What lay behind this enormity implied by a woman who measured her words so meticulously?
Stalactite & Stalagmite: A Brief Illustrated History of Earth and One Great Truth about Love

1 week ago | themarginalian.org | Maria Popova

We are always either drawing closer or drifting apart — there is no stasis in relationships. The direction of movement may change over the course of a relationship, but there is no stasis.
States of Possession: Erich Neumann on Creativity, the Unconscious, and the Psychology of Transformation

1 week ago | themarginalian.org | Maria Popova

There are things in life that come over you sudden as a flash flood, total as an eclipse — the great loves, the great creative passions, the great urges to conquer a mountain or a theorem. They can feel like an alien invasion, like the immense hand of some imperative has seized your soul from the outside.
How to Claim Your Life: D.H. Lawrence on the Most Important Choice Within

2 weeks ago | themarginalian.org | Maria Popova

Only a fool or an egomaniac would deny that chance shapes the vast majority of life. The time, place, culture, family, body, brain, and biochemistry we are born into, the people who cross our path, the accidents that befall us — these dwarf in consequence the sum total of our choices.
The Art of Befriending Time and Change: Debbie Millman’s Illustrated Love Letter to Gardening as a Portal to Self-discovery

2 weeks ago | themarginalian.org | Maria Popova

You may or may not find the meaning of life while pacing a flower bed, but each time you plunge your bare hands into the hummus of the Earth and run your fingers through the roots of something that hungers for the sun, you are resisting the dying of the light and saying “yes” to life. Gardening may or may not make you a great writer, but it will lavish you with metaphors, those fulcrums of meaning without which all writing — all thinking — would be merely catalog copy for a still life.
Introducing Marginalian Editions: Extraordinary Forgotten Books Brought Back to Life

3 weeks ago | themarginalian.org | Maria Popova

I have become a person on the pages and in the margins of books. In nearly two decades of reckoning with my reading in writing, it has been my ongoing lamentation to see works of enduring beauty and substance perish out of print — because the ideas they conduct are not the easiest and most marketable, because amid a culture that reduces literature to a commodity and binds readers in a moral paradox they ask us to think more widely and feel more deeply.
The Kiln and the Quantum of Relationships

3 weeks ago | themarginalian.org | Maria Popova

Anything you give your time to and polish with attention will become a lens on your search for meaning, will lavish you with metaphors that become backdoors into the locked room of your most urgent reckonings. In my nascent adventures in pottery, I have observed with great fascination how two different glazes, when combined, produce an entirely unpredictable result — something not greater than the sum of its parts but of a wholly different order.
Twenty Ways to Matter

4 weeks ago | themarginalian.org | Maria Popova

The two great tasks of the creative life are keeping failure from breaking the spirit and keeping success from ossifying it. If you do attain success by the weft and warp of hard work and luck, it takes great courage to resist becoming a template of yourself that replicates whatever has garnered you acclaim in the past, continually lowering and lowering your willingness to take risks, narrowing and narrowing your locus of curiosity — that elemental building block of creativity.