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Maria Popova Quotes

Total quotes: 5
“Why put in the effort to explain why it isn’t a fit, if they haven’t done the homework to determine if it is a fit?”
— Maria Popova, Maria Popova on Writing, Workflow, and Workarounds
Tagged: Tim Podcast, Effort, A Good Fit
“How, in this blink of existence bookended by nothingness, do we attain completeness of being?”
— Maria Popova, Figuring
Tagged: Existence, Life, Meaning
“The patience of making art is a lonely patience — one that demands the solitude essential for creative work, be it art or science, so widely recognized by creators across time and discipline.”
— Maria Popova, Rilke on the Lonely Patience of Creative Work
“If time is the substance we are made of, as Borges so memorably wrote the year the teenage Eunice Waymon began studying to become “the world’s first great black classical pianist” before she made herself into Nina Simone, then there is something singularly haunting and mysterious about the fragments of substance we leave behind after time unmakes us. Their ghostly materiality might be our only real form of time travel, our only undeluded form of immortality — the ultimate evidence that time is, in the deepest sense, alive.”
— Maria Popova, Nina Simone’s Gum and the Shimmering Strangeness of How Art Casts Its Transcendent Spell on Us
“This awareness, so unnerving against the backdrop of our irrepressible yearning for constancy and permanence, was first unlatched when the ancients began suspecting that the Earth, rather than being the static center of the heavens it was long thought to be, is in motion, right beneath our feet. But it took millennia for the most disorienting evidence of inconstancy to dawn — the discovery that the universe itself is in flux, constantly expanding, growing thinner and thinner as stars grow farther and farther apart. In 1929, the astronomer Edwin Hubble built on the work of other scientists and formalized this in what is now known as Hubble’s Law — the first observational evidence for the ongoing expansion of the universe, which in turn furnished foundational evidence for the Big Bang model: If the universe is constantly expanding, to trace it backward along the arrow of time is to imagine it smaller and smaller, all the way down to the seeming nothingness that banged into the somethingness within which everything exists.”
— Maria Popova, The Habits of Light: A Celebration of Pioneering Astronomer Henrietta Leavitt, Whose Calculations Proved That the Universe Is Expanding
Tagged: How To Think, Universe, beauty, Somethingness
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