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. Still, our choices are the points of light that flicker against the opaque immensity of chance to illuminate our lives with meaning, just as stars, all the billions of them, comprise a mere 0.4% percent of a universe made mostly of dark energy and dark matter, and yet those same sparse stars

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. But when you look back on them once they have had their way with you, if you are awake enough to your own life and conscious enough of your unconscious, you come to realize that they were not a possession by some external force but dispossessed parts of you yearning for integration. This is why our states of possession are some of the most profound experiences we can have as human beings — they are both revelations and transformations of the self, those eruptions of the psyche that raise new summits of possibility for our creativity and our vitality.

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.

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

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

Mushrooms made the world what it is

We are perishable matter yearning for meaning, and time is both the matter and the meaning of our lives. “Time is a river that sweeps me along but I am the river,” Borges

Walking through the white-walled gallery at the graduation show of one of New York's most esteemed art schools, between beautiful young people with Instagram faces, I was struck to see project after project take up as its subject the least durable, most illusory aspect of human existence: the self. Where was the Iris Murdoch in these dawning artists' lives to remind them that art, at its best, is

“Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy,” Albert Camus wrote in one of the most

When AI first began colonizing language — which is still our best instrument for bridging the abyss between us, a container for thought and feeling that shapes the contents — I asked chatGPT to compose a poem about a solar eclipse in the style of Walt Whitman. It returned a ledger of cliches in rhymed couplets. Getting the form wrong — Whitman did not rhyme — seemed like an easy correction by a line of code. Getting poetry itself wrong was the interesting question, the question that gets at the heart of why we make poems (or paintings or novels or songs) — a question fundamentally about what it means to be human.