Maria Popova — Cartographer of Meaning in a Digital Age

"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."

“human-powered discovery engine for interestingness.”

“Giving the people what they want isn’t nearly as powerful as teaching people what they need. There’s always a shortcut available, a way to be a little more ironic, cheaper, more instantly understandable. There’s the chance to play into our desire to be entertained and distracted regardless of the cost. Most of all, there’s the temptation to encour... See more

" 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

We never see the world exactly as it is because we are how the world is. I think it was William James who said, “My experience is what I agree to attend to, and only those things which I notice shaped my mind.” 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, ou... 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 differe... See more

The reason we’re so increasingly intolerant of long articles and why we skim them, why we skip forward even in a short video that reduces a 300-page book into a three-minute animation — even in that we skip forward — is that we’ve been infected with this kind of pathological impatience that makes us want to have the knowledge but not do the work of... See more

"My site is really a record of my becoming who I am. I started so early in my 20s. I didn’t know who I was. I wasn’t doing that much reading then. And it eventually became that. Right now, I rarely read the internet at all. I spend most of my days buried in book piles and letters and diaries and old philosophy books and what not. There’s this term ... 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.