Maria Popova famous quotes

Last updated: Sep 5, 2024

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

#Important #World #Packaging
Presence is far more intricate and rewarding an art than productivity.
-- Maria Popova

#Art #Productivity
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, donâ€™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
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
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
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
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
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 #Profound
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
Build pockets of stillness into your life.
-- Maria Popova

#Entrepreneur #Pockets #Stillness
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
Be curious. Be constantly, consistently, indiscriminatel y curious.
-- Maria Popova

#Curious #Consistently
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
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
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

#Joy #Wonder #Capacity
I think you need to be a little in loveâ€”not necessarily in a romantic sense, although that helpsâ€”but to be in love with the reality of your own life.
-- Maria Popova

#Reality #Thinking #Needs
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

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