Maria Popova — Cartographer of Meaning in a Digital Age

" I think what’s funny is that I used to marvel for a long time why my best ideas — and by ideas, I don’t mean the ideas about what to write or all of that, but just insights on the truths of my experience, of the human experience, whatever. Those ideas, the best of them came to me at the gym or on my bike or in the shower. I used to have these ela... See more

"I think people hunger to do something useful with their time in our age of uselessness, time uselessly spent, but also something ennobling with their time. This can’t quite be quantified. There’s no utilitarian value to it the way that there is with usefulness. But I deeply believe that people want to be good, that, more than that, we want to be b... See more

"For me, that’s pretty much it: waking up and being excited and curiously restless to face the day ahead, and being very present with that day, and then going to bed feeling like it actually happened, that the day was lived. There’s nothing more than that, really."

It’s so strange how we’re able to carry forward this mystery of personal identity even when our present selves are so different from our future selves and from our past selves most of all. I think a lot about this question of, what is a person? Am I the same person as my childhood self? Sure, we share the same body, but even that body is so differe... See more

"It’s so strange how we’re able to carry forward this mystery of personal identity even when our present selves are so different from our future selves and from our past selves most of all. I think a lot about this question of, what is a person? Am I the same person as my childhood self? Sure, we share the same body, but even that body is so differ... See more

I used to have these elaborate theories that maybe there was something about the movement of the body and the water that magically sparked a deeper consciousness. But I’ve really come to realize the obvious thing, which is that these are simply the most unburdened spaces in my life, the moments in which I have the greatest uninterrupted intimacy wi... See more

"Doing the work that your parents then do for your spirit or for your character. But there’s an aspect of it that I like: It led me to think about what I do as a kind of two-way, generational reparenting. On the one hand, caring for these bygone thinkers, while at the same time imbuing the present generation with their hand-me-down wisdom and their... See more

In choosing how we are in the world, we shape our experience of that world, our contribution to it. We shape our world, our inner world, our outer world, which is really the only one we’ll ever know. And to me, that’s the substance of the spiritual journey. That’s not an exasperating idea but an infinitely emboldening one.

“human-powered discovery engine for interestingness.”