The Universe in Verse: 15 Portals to Wonder through Science & Poetry
tell stories about what is real and what is possible, and what it means to be.
Maria Popova • The Universe in Verse: 15 Portals to Wonder through Science & Poetry
Fungi are the mightiest kingdom of life, and the least understood by our science, and the most everlasting.
Maria Popova • The Universe in Verse: 15 Portals to Wonder through Science & Poetry
We, this people, on this wayward, floating body Created on this earth, of this earth
Maria Popova • The Universe in Verse: 15 Portals to Wonder through Science & Poetry
Skeletal and pulmonary, winter trees rise into the leaden sky, their skin a braille poem of resilience.
Maria Popova • The Universe in Verse: 15 Portals to Wonder through Science & Poetry
To live wonder-smitten with reality is the gladdest way to live.
Maria Popova • The Universe in Verse: 15 Portals to Wonder through Science & Poetry
It may be that art is simply what we call our most constructive coping mechanism for the incomprehension of life and mortality,
Maria Popova • The Universe in Verse: 15 Portals to Wonder through Science & Poetry
Foster’s character peers out her spaceship window as she approaches an extraordinary alien world and gasps: “They should’ve sent a poet!”
Maria Popova • The Universe in Verse: 15 Portals to Wonder through Science & Poetry
A tree is a light-catcher that grows life from air—an enormous eye tuned to the light of the universe.
Maria Popova • The Universe in Verse: 15 Portals to Wonder through Science & Poetry
Sagan delivered at Cornell University in 1994—a speech that swelled into a best-selling book the following year, reverencing Earth as a “mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam,” on which “everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives.”