Reads by Maria Popova

A Bioluminescent Wonder: Rachel Carson on the Art of Illuminating Nature Beyond Scientific Fact

A transcendent account of “one of those experiences that gives an odd and hard-to-describe feeling, with so many overtones beyond the facts themselves.”

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Elizabeth Barrett Browning on Love and the Seductions of Honesty

“You must prepare yourself to forbear and to forgive — will you?”

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Good Sense vs. Free Hope: Margaret Fuller on Reaping Wonder from Everyday Reality

“The mind is not … a highway, but a temple, and its doors should not be carelessly left open.”

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School Prayer: Diane Ackerman’s Poetic Invitation to Attentive Presence as a Means of Transcendence and Secular Spirituality

A hymn to the numinous splendor of nature.

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The Muskrat and the Meaning of Life: Loren Eiseley on Reclaiming Our Sense of the Miraculous in a Mechanical Age

“We forget that nature itself is one vast miracle transcending the reality of night and nothingness. We forget that each one of us in his personal life repeats that miracle.”

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How to Live with Death

Psychoanalyst Adam Phillips on how Darwin and Freud reframed our mortality as an organizing principle of human life.

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Frida Kahlo on the Meanings of the Colors

From the color of madness and mystery to that of distance and tenderness.

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Kafka on the Power of Music and the Point of Making Art

“Art like prayer is a hand outstretched in the darkness, seeking for some touch of grace which will transform it into a hand that bestows gifts.”

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You Are Not the Target: Laura Huxley on Course-Correcting the Paths of Love and Not-Love

“In all its manifestations and however it is produced, not-love tends to beget not-love. The energy of love is needed to reconvert not-love into love.”

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Legendary Cosmologist Martin Rees on Science, Religion, and the Future of Post-Human Intelligence

“Fundamental physics shows how hard it is for us to grasp even the simplest things in the world. That makes you quite skeptical whenever someone declares he has the key to some deeper reality.”

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Reads by Maria Popova

A transcendent account of “one of those experiences that gives an odd and hard-to-describe feeling, with so many overtones beyond the facts themselves.”

“You must prepare yourself to forbear and to forgive — will you?”

“The mind is not … a highway, but a temple, and its doors should not be carelessly left open.”

A hymn to the numinous splendor of nature.

“We forget that nature itself is one vast miracle transcending the reality of night and nothingness. We forget that each one of us in his personal life repeats that miracle.”

Psychoanalyst Adam Phillips on how Darwin and Freud reframed our mortality as an organizing principle of human life.

From the color of madness and mystery to that of distance and tenderness.

“Art like prayer is a hand outstretched in the darkness, seeking for some touch of grace which will transform it into a hand that bestows gifts.”

“In all its manifestations and however it is produced, not-love tends to beget not-love. The energy of love is needed to reconvert not-love into love.”

“Fundamental physics shows how hard it is for us to grasp even the simplest things in the world. That makes you quite skeptical whenever someone declares he has the key to some deeper reality.”

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