Figuring
Maria Popova
Top 10 Best 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.”
“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.”
“History is not what happened, but what survives the shipwrecks of judgment and chance.”
“Nobody knows what goes on between two hearts including, more often than not, the people in whose chests they beat.”
“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.”
“What is love, after all, if not an affectionate acceptance of the lover's full spectrum of being, the silly along with the solemn?”
“those who stand to gain from the manipulation of truth often prey on those bereft of critical thinking.”
“Kepler knew what we habitually forget—that the locus of possibility expands when the unimaginable is imagined and then made real through systematic effort.”
“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?”
“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.”
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Book Keywords:
naming, possibility, couples, attraction, love, expansion, chance, history, effort, admiration, imagination, cataloguing, lovers
