Maria Popova

“Real isn't how you are made… It's a thing that happens to you,” says the Skin Horse — a stuffed toy brought to life by a child's love — in

Meaning is not something we find — it is something we make, and the puzzle pieces are often the fragments of our shattered hopes and dreams. “There

This is the history of the world: revolutionaries turning into tyrants, leaders who claim to stand with the masses turning the individuals within them on each other, stirring certainties and self-righteousness to distract from the uncomfortable unknowns, from the great open question of what makes us and keeps us human, and human together.

The best advice we have for anyone else is always advice to ourselves , honed on the sincerity of living, learned through life's best teaching tool: suffering.

What are you unwilling to feel? This is one of the most brutal, most clarifying questions in life, answering which requires great courage and great vulnerability. Out of that unwillingness arises the greatest inner tension of the heart: that between what we wish we felt and what we are actually feeling.

“Words belong to each other,” Virginia Woolf rasped in the only surviving recording of her voice — a love letter to language as an instrument of

Among the paradoxes of friendship is this: All friendships of depth and durability are based on a profound knowledge of each other, of the soul

After receiving U.S. permission to do so, Ukraine is firing long-range missiles supplied by the United States into Russia for the first time, senior U.S. and Ukrainian officials have said.

“What makes Heroic?” asked Nietzsche as he was emerging from depression , then answered: “To face simultaneously one's greatest suffering and one's

“What we see from the air is so simple and beautiful,” Georgia O'Keeffe wrote after her first airplane flight, “I cannot help feeling that it would do something wonderful for the human race — rid it of much smallness and pettiness if more people flew.”