Reads by Maria Popova

Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” Brought to Life in a Spanish Flashmob of 100 Musicians

A touchingly human reminder of our capacity for ecstasy, transcendence, and collective felicity.

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The Double Flame: Octavio Paz on Love

“Love is a bet, a wild one, placed on freedom. Not my own; the freedom of the Other… A knot made of two intertwined freedoms.”

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Loving the Tree of Life: Annie Dillard on How to Bear Your Mortality

“We live and move by splitting the light of the present, as a canoe’s bow parts water.”

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Henry James on Losing a Mother

“These are hours of exquisite pain; thank Heaven this particular pang comes to us but once.”

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Let Your Heart Be Broken

“The miracle is that we rise again out of suffering… The miracle is that we create ourselves anew.”

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The Heart of Matter: Pierre Teilhard de Chardin on Bridging the Scientific and the Sacred

“Blessed be you, mighty matter, irresistible march of evolution, reality ever new-born; you who, by constantly shattering our mental categories, force us to go ever further and further in our pursuit of the truth.”

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Consciousness, Artificial Intelligence, and Our Search for Meaning: Oliver Sacks on ChatGPT, 30 Years Before ChatGPT

“We read excitedly of the latest chemical, computational, or quantum theory of mind, and then ask, ‘Is that all there is to it?'”

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Practical Mysticism: Evelyn Underhill’s Stunning Century-Old Manifesto for Secular Transcendence and Seeing the Heart of Reality

“Because mystery is horrible to us, we have agreed for the most part to live in a world of labels; to make of them the current coin of experience, and ignore their merely symbolic character, the infinite gradation of values which they misrepresent.”

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Heroism and the Human Search for Meaning: Ernest Becker on the Hidden Root of Our Existential Longing

“To become conscious of what one is doing to earn his feeling of heroism is the main self-analytic problem of life.”

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How to Grow Up: Nick Cave’s Life-Advice to a 13-Year-Old

“Fill yourself with the beautiful stuff of the world… Get amazed. Get astonished. Get awed on a regular basis, so that getting awed is habitual and becomes a state of being.”

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Reads by Maria Popova

A touchingly human reminder of our capacity for ecstasy, transcendence, and collective felicity.

“Love is a bet, a wild one, placed on freedom. Not my own; the freedom of the Other… A knot made of two intertwined freedoms.”

“We live and move by splitting the light of the present, as a canoe’s bow parts water.”

“These are hours of exquisite pain; thank Heaven this particular pang comes to us but once.”

“The miracle is that we rise again out of suffering… The miracle is that we create ourselves anew.”

“Blessed be you, mighty matter, irresistible march of evolution, reality ever new-born; you who, by constantly shattering our mental categories, force us to go ever further and further in our pursuit of the truth.”

“We read excitedly of the latest chemical, computational, or quantum theory of mind, and then ask, ‘Is that all there is to it?'”

“Because mystery is horrible to us, we have agreed for the most part to live in a world of labels; to make of them the current coin of experience, and ignore their merely symbolic character, the infinite gradation of values which they misrepresent.”

“To become conscious of what one is doing to earn his feeling of heroism is the main self-analytic problem of life.”

“Fill yourself with the beautiful stuff of the world… Get amazed. Get astonished. Get awed on a regular basis, so that getting awed is habitual and becomes a state of being.”

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