Maria Popova Quotes

Quotes about:

• In order for us to truly create and contribute to the world, we have to be able to connect countless dots, to cross-pollinate ideas from a wealth of disciplines, to combine and recombine these pieces and build new castles.

  Maria Popova

  Order, Ideas, Discipline

  25 Copy quote

• Build pockets of stillness into your life. Meditate. Go for walks. Ride your bike going nowhere in particular. There is a creative purpose to daydreaming, even to boredom. The best ideas come to us when we stop actively trying to coax the muse into manifesting and let the fragments of experience float around our unconscious mind in order to click into new combinations. Without this essential stage of unconscious processing, the entire flow of the creative process is broken.

  Maria Popova

  Motivational, Order, Ideas

  25 Copy quote

• Curation is more than packaging-it is to help readers [discern] what is important in the world.

  Maria Popova

  Important, World, Packaging

  46 Copy quote

• Life is a continual process of arrival into who we are.

  Maria Popova

  Who We Are, Life Is, Process

  13 Copy quote

• Be generous with your time and your resources and with giving credit and, especially, with your words. It's so much easier to be a critic than a celebrator. Always remember there is a human being on the other end of every exchange and behind every cultural artifact being critiqued. To understand and be understood, those are among life's greatest gifts, and every interaction is an opportunity to exchange them.

  Maria Popova

  Motivational, Opportunity, Giving

  "Happy Birthday, Brain Pickings: 7 Things I Learned in 7 Years of Reading, Writing, and Living". www.brainpickings.org. October 23, 2013.

  17 Copy quote

• Presence is far more intricate and rewarding an art than productivity.

  Maria Popova

  Art, Intricate, Productivity

  Twitter post from Nov 3, 2013

  26 Copy quote

• Be curious. Be constantly, consistently, indiscriminatel y curious.

  Maria Popova

  Curious, Consistently

  21 Copy quote

• I think you need to be a little in love—not necessarily in a romantic sense, although that helps—but to be in love with the reality of your own life.

  Maria Popova

  Reality, Thinking, Needs

  21 Copy quote

• When people tell you who they are, Maya Angelou famously advised, believe them. Just as importantly, however, when people try to tell you who you are, don’t believe them. You are the only custodian of your own integrity, and the assumptions made by those that misunderstand who you are and what you stand for reveal a great deal about them and absolutely nothing about you.

  Maria Popova

  Integrity, Believe, People

  20 Copy quote

• We are a collage of our interests, our influences, our inspirations, all the fragmentary impressions we've collected by being alive and awake to the world. Who we "are" is simply a finely curated catalog of those.

  Maria Popova

  Inspiration, Alive, World

  "Literature is the original Internet". Interview with Max Tholl, www.theeuropean-magazine.com. August 25, 2014.

  25 Copy quote

• This is the power of art: The power to transcend our own self-interest, our solipsistic zoom-lens on life, and relate to the world and each other with more integrity, more curiosity, more wholeheartedness.

  Maria Popova

  Art, Integrity, Self

  "What Is Art? Favorite Famous Definitions, from Antiquity to Today" by Maria Popova, www.brainpickings.org. June 22, 2012.

  22 Copy quote

• To understand and be understood, those are among life's greatest gifts, and every interaction is an opportunity to exchange them

  Maria Popova

  Opportunity, Understood, Interaction

  12 Copy quote

• Presence is far more intricate and rewarding an art than productivity. Ours is a culture that measures our worth as human beings by our efficiency, our earnings, our ability to perform this or that. The cult of productivity has its place, but worshipping at its altar daily robs us of the very capacity for joy and wonder that makes life worth living.

  Maria Popova

  Art, Joy, Culture

  16 Copy quote

• Because it is possible to create - creating one's self, willing to be one's self - one has anxiety. One would have no anxiety if there were no possibility whatever.

  Maria Popova

  Self, Creating, Anxiety

  11 Copy quote

• You enrich people with creative resources, and over time, these Lego bricks that end up in their heads eventually build this enormous, incredible castle.

  Maria Popova

  People, Creative, Castles

  Source: www.motherjones.com

  37 Copy quote

• What is needed isn't merely tolerance but acceptance, wholehearted and unconditional.

  Maria Popova

  Acceptance, Tolerance, Unconditional

  11 Copy quote

• Most of us live our lives desperately trying to conceal the anguishing gap between our polished, aspirational, representational selves and our real, human, deeply flawed selves. Dunham lives hers in that gap, welcomes the rest of the world into it with boundless openheartedness, and writes about it with the kind of profound self-awareness and self-compassion that invite us to inhabit our own gaps and maybe even embrace them a little bit more, anguish over them a little bit less.

  Maria Popova

  Real, Writing, Compassion

  12 Copy quote

• Curation is a form of pattern recognition - pieces of information or insight which over time amount to an implicit point of view.

  Maria Popova

  Views, Pieces, Patterns

  4 Copy quote

• I have bad days. Sometimes I have a lot of bad days. By and large, I think most people fall into a bad mood because they're able to ruminate on whatever the problem at hand is, and that makes it worse. But when you intercept the rumination process with something that requires your full attention - that's stimulating and absorbing, that places a demand on your intellectual focus - you don't get to ruminate. In a way, it's a mental health aid to be able to do that so much. My routine, what I do, it just feels like home. It's my comfort food.

  Maria Popova

  Fall, Home, Bad Day

  15 Copy quote

• he cult of productivity has its place, but worshipping at its altar daily robs us of the very capacity for joy and wonder that makes life worth living...

  Maria Popova

  Joy, Wonder, Capacity

  "Happy Birthday, Brain Pickings: 7 Things I Learned in 7 Years of Reading," by Maria Popova, www.brainpickings.org. October 23, 2013.

  4 Copy quote

• Our chronic discomfort with ambiguity - which, ironically, is critical to both our creativity and the richness of our lives - leads us to lock down safe, comfortable, familiar interpretations, even if they are only partial representations of or fully disconnected from reality.

  Maria Popova

  Creativity, Reality, Locks

  7 Copy quote

• Build pockets of stillness into your life.

  Maria Popova

  Entrepreneur, Pockets, Stillness

  "Happy Birthday, Brain Pickings: 7 Things I Learned in 7 Years of Reading, Writing, and Living". www.brainpickings.org. October 23, 2013.

  4 Copy quote

• Leaving love behind is never easy, for it also asks that we leave behind the part of ourselves that did the loving. And yet for all but the very fortunate and the very foolish, this difficult transition is an inevitable part of the human experience, of the ceaseless learning journey that is life - because, after all, anything worth pursuing is worth failing at, and fail we do as we pursue.

  Maria Popova

  Journey, Love Is, Leaving

  "When Leaving Becomes Arriving: Poet and Philosopher David Whyte on Ending Relationships". www.brainpickings.org. April 6, 2015.

  4 Copy quote

• There are really cool or funny videos, or visually stunning photos, and that's fine, but none of them really give you more when you close that tab, you know? I try to find stuff that a little bit, in a tiny way changes how you see something about the world.

  Maria Popova

  Giving, Trying, Funny Videos

  Source: www.motherjones.com

  8 Copy quote

• When I discovered PopTech and other kind of intellectualish, online portals for curiosity. Very quickly, I just got so much more out of those than from so-called "Ivy League" education that I knew it was on me to keep myself stimulated, and to keep learning, more than anything. And, because I paid my way through college, I was working at Penn, two to four jobs at a time to pay for school.

  Maria Popova

  Jobs, School, College

  Source: www.motherjones.com

  6 Copy quote

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