30+ Maria Popova Quotes (Creative, Insightful And Engaging)

Maria Popova is a Bulgarian writer and journalist. She is best known for her novels, short stories, and essays. She is also the founder of the popular website Brain Pickings, which features her writings and reflections on culture, art, and science.

Top 10 Maria Popova Quotes

1. Curation is more than packaging-it is to help readers [discern] what is important in the world.
2. You enrich people with creative resources, and over time, these Lego bricks that end up in their heads eventually build this enormous, incredible castle.
3. Presence is far more intricate and rewarding an art than productivity.
4. Be curious. Be constantly, consistently, indiscriminatel y curious.
5. 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.
6. 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.
7. To understand and be understood, those are among life's greatest gifts, and every interaction is an opportunity to exchange them
8. Life is a continual process of arrival into who we are.
9. Curation is a form of pattern recognition - pieces of information or insight which over time amount to an implicit point of view.
10. What is needed isn't merely tolerance but acceptance, wholehearted and unconditional.

Maria Popova Famous Quotes And Sayings

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

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

Artist Allen Crawford brings Whitman's undying text to new life in gorgeous hand-lettering and illustrations, transforming the 60-page poem originally published in 1855 as the centerpiece of Leaves of Grass into a breathtaking 256-page piece of art. — Maria Popova

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

Universal WiFi. Without a doubt. I am done with being on the train, not having internet. Or having spotty coverage. It's a fundamental need at this point. It's the frickin' information age! It should be like air! And it doesn't have to be free. I'm a believer in paying for value. Just having it as an option. — Maria Popova

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

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

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

What I pick for my blog and what I pick for Twitter are different things. One thing that is true for both, by and large, is that it has to feel like something that leaves you with more than just a moment of gawking. — Maria Popova

I didn't really - at least intellectually and creatively - have a particularly compelling experience in college. But during my junior year, they made the TED talks public. So I started listening to them. They were producing one per day, and I was listening to one per day, every day, at the gym. — Maria Popova

Build pockets of stillness into your life. — Maria Popova

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

So depending on the day, my schedule is different. But, generally speaking, I get up in the morning, I do a 30 to 45 minute prescheduling of tweets and just seeing if there's anything urgent - do-or-die emails or server outages, stuff like that. Then after that I go to the gym, where I do all my long-form reading - so Instapaper, and all the Kindle books. I go through an embarrassing amount of books per week. — Maria Popova

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

One of my jobs was at a start-up ad agency. They were trying to do things differently, work with socially conscious clients, and to really be a more creative take on advertising than the industry itself. But I noticed that what the guys at the office were circulating for inspiration still came from within the ad industry. I thought that was really counterintuitive - to only borrow inspiration from within your own industry. — Maria Popova

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

Elegant and lucid . . . a pitch-perfect clarion call, issued not with preachy hubris but from a deep place of humility, for awakening to the greatest rewards of living . . . The Road to Character is an essential read in its entirety-Anne Lamott with a harder edge of moral philosophy, Seneca with a softer edge of spiritual sensitivity, E. F. Schumacher for perplexed moderns. — Maria Popova

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

But most weeks I've gone through 12 books, maybe even 15 some weeks, depending on the length. So I go through my long form, and then my day begins. I usually try to do most of my writing earlier in the day because I sort of lump out later on. — Maria Popova

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

Life Lessons by Maria Popova

1. Maria Popova's work emphasizes the importance of curiosity and learning, showing that knowledge can be found in unexpected places.
2. She encourages readers to be open to new ideas and to embrace the unknown, demonstrating that growth and change can be positive.
3. Her writing also serves as a reminder of the power of storytelling and the importance of connecting with others through shared experiences.