Figuring Quotes

“The richest relationships are often those that don’t fit neatly into the preconceived slots we have made for the archetypes we imagine would populate our lives—the friend, the lover, the parent, the sibling, the mentor, the muse. We meet people who belong to no single slot, who figure into multiple categories at different times and in different magnitudes. We then must either stretch ourselves to create new slots shaped after these singular relationships, enduring the growing pains of self-expansion, or petrify.”
― Maria Popova, Figuring

“History is not what happened, but what survives the shipwrecks of judgment and chance.”
― Maria Popova, Figuring

“When we encounter a person of exceptional intellectual and creative vitality, their magnetism can disorient the compass needle of admiration and attraction—it becomes difficult, sometimes impossible, to tease apart the desire to be with from the desire to be like.”
― Maria Popova, Figuring

“Nobody knows what goes on between two hearts including, more often than not, the people in whose chests they beat.”
― Maria Popova, Figuring

“What is love, after all, if not an affectionate acceptance of the lover's full spectrum of being, the silly along with the solemn?”
― Maria Popova, Figuring

“It is not cowardice but courage to acknowledge the superior role chance plays in steering the course of life, and at the same time to take responsibility for the margin of difference our personal choices do make within the parameters of chance.”
― Maria Popova, Figuring

“It is a beautiful impulse to contain the infinite in the finite, to rest order from the chaos, to construct a foothold so we may climb towards higher truth. It is also a limiting one, for in naming things we often come to mistake the names for the things themselves.”
― Maria Popova, Figuring

“Kepler knew what we habitually forget—that the locus of possibility expands when the unimaginable is imagined and then made real through systematic effort.”
― Maria Popova, Figuring

“Lives interweave with other lives, and out of the tapestry arise hints at answers to questions that raze to the bone of life: What are the building blocks of character, of contentment, of lasting achievement? How does a person come into self-possession and sovereignty of mind against the tide of convention and unreasoning collectivism? Does genius suffice for happiness, does distinction, does love?”
― Maria Popova, Figuring

“Meanwhile, someplace in the world, somebody is making love and another a poem. Elsewhere in the universe, a star manyfold the mass of our third-rate sun is living out its final moments in a wild spin before collapsing into a black hole, its exhale bending spacetime itself into a well of nothingness that can swallow every atom that ever touched us and every datum we ever produced, every poem and statue and symphony we’ve ever known—an entropic spectacle insentient to questions of blame and mercy, devoid of why.
“In four billion years, our own star will follow its fate, collapsing into a white dwarf. We exist only by chance, after all. The Voyager will still be sailing into the interstellar shorelessness on the wings of the “heavenly breezes” Kepler had once imagined, carrying Beethoven on a golden disc crafted by a symphonic civilization that long ago made love and war and mathematics on a distant blue dot.
But until that day comes, nothing once created ever fully leaves us. Seeds are planted and come abloom generations, centuries, civilizations later, migrating across coteries and countries and continents. Meanwhile, people live and people die—in peace as war rages on, in poverty and disrepute as latent fame awaits, with much that never meets its more, in shipwrecked love.
I will die.
You will die.
The atoms that huddled for a cosmic blink around the shadow of a self will return to the seas that made us.
What will survive of us are shoreless seeds and stardust.”
― Maria Popova, Figuring

“those who stand to gain from the manipulation of truth often prey on those bereft of critical thinking.”
― Maria Popova, Figuring

“I will die, you will die the atoms that huddled for a cosmic blink around a shadow of a self will return to the seas that made us. What will survive of us are shores seeds and stardust.”
― Maria Popova, Figuring

“Throughout life, our habits, beliefs, and ideas evolve beyond recognition. Our physical and social environments change. Almost all of our cells are replaced. Yet we remain, to ourselves, “who” “we” “are.”
― Maria Popova, Figuring

“We suffer by wanting different things often at odds with one another, but we suffer even more by wanting to want different things.”
― Maria Popova, Figuring

“This false notion of the body as the testing ground for intimacy has long warped our understanding of what constitutes a romantic relationship. The measure of intimacy is not the quotient of friction between skin and skin, but something else entirely—something of the love and trust, the joy and ease that flow between two people as they inhabit that private world walled off from everything and everyone else.”
― Maria Popova, Figuring

“Every voracious reader knows that there is no Dewey system for the Babel of the mind. You walk amid the labyrinthine stacks and ideas leap at you like dust bunnies drawn from the motes that cover a great many different books ready long ago.”
― Maria Popova, Figuring

“Beyond any human lifetime, and often even within it, what is recorded is what is remembered, the records gradually displacing the actuality of lived events. And what is recorded is a fraction of what is thought, felt, acted out, lived—a fraction at best edited by the very act of its selection, at worst warped by rationalization or fictionalized by a deliberate retelling of reality. The stories we tell about our own lives, to others but especially to ourselves, we tell in order to make our lives livable.”
― Maria Popova, Figuring

“We are always harshest upon those foibles we see in others that we know bedevil our own natures - the ones that most gravely misbecome our self image - for blame is always easier than shame.”
― Maria Popova, Figuring

“At watershed moments of upheaval and transformation, we anticipate with terror the absence of the familiar parts of life and of ourselves that are being washed away by the current of change. But we fail to envision the unfamiliar gladness and gratifications the new tide would bring, the unfathomed presences, for our imaginations are bounded by our experience. The unknown awakens in us a reptilian dread that plays out with the same ferocity on scales personal, societal, and civilizational, whether triggered by a new life-chapter or a new political regime or a new world order.”
― Maria Popova, Figuring

“Those accustomed to hard work and self-propulsion, who have risen to the zenith of accomplishment by force of will and magnitude of effort, are most susceptible to the supreme self-damnation of human life—the belief that love is something to be earned by striving rather than something that comes unbidden like a shepherd's song on a summer evening in the mountains of Bulgaria.”
― Maria Popova, Figuring

“It takes rare courage to recognize that feelings are the most perishable of our possessions, even more so than opinions, for an opinion -- that is, a real opinion, which is qualitatively different than a fleeting impression or a borrowed stance -- is arrived at via a well-reasoned argument with oneself. Not so a feeling -- feelings coalesce out of the vapors that escape from the deepest groundwaters of our unreasoned and unreasonable being, and whatever rainbows they may scatter for a moment when touched with the light of another, they diffuse and evaporate just as readily, just as mysteriously.
Love, Margaret implies in her letter to Sam, is never to be taken for granted -- it is to be met moment by moment, on its ever-changing terms.”
― Maria Popova, Figuring

“She was beginning to realize that no amount of genius ever compensates for, nor excuses, a paucity of kindness, integrity, and unconflicted devotion.”
― Maria Popova, Figuring

“We spend our lives trying to discern where we end and the rest of the world begins. We snatch our freeze-frame of life from the simultaneity of existence holding on to the illusions of permanence, congruence, and linearity; of static selves and lives that unfold in sensical narratives. All the while, we mistake chance for choice, our labels and models of things for the things themselves, our records for history. History is not what happened, but what survives the shipwrecks of judgment and chance.”
― Maria Popova, Figuring

“Even the farthest seers can't bend their gaze beyond their era's horizon of possibility, but the horizon shifts with each incremental revolution as the human mind peers outward to take in nature, then turns inward to question its own givens. We sieve the world through the mesh of these certitudes, tautened by nature and culture, but every once in a while—whether by accident or conscious effort—the wire loosens and the kernel of revolution slips through.”
― Maria Popova, Figuring

“Language is not the content of thought but the vessel into which we pour the ambivalences and contradictions of our thinking, afloat on the current of time.”
― Maria Popova, Figuring

“This is the paradox of transformative experience: Because our imagination is bounded by our existing templates of how the world as we know it works, we fail to anticipate the greatest transformations—the events and encounters so unmoored from the familiar that they transfigure our map of reality and propel us into a wholly novel mode of being.”
― Maria Popova, Figuring

“Memory and motive are the two edges of the blade by which we slice experience out of events and carve out history - personal, political, civilizational - from the trunk of life. Both are highly selective - memory retrospectively so and motive prospectively.”
― Maria Popova, Figuring

“There is no overstating the triumph of having remained motivated by beauty in taking down the ugliest malignancies of human nature’s grasp for power.”
― Maria Popova, Figuring

“Perhaps, after all, we aren't divided so much into mind and body as into mind and mind. And few forces can propel humanity forward more reliably than the cleaving together of kindred minds in solidarity to a shared truth.”
― Maria Popova, Figuring

“Can any author ever imagine just how far literature reaches into unfathomed horizons of culture, what it transforms and whom it liberates?”
― Maria Popova, Figuring