Figuring

by Maria Popova

How many revolutions does the cog of culture make before a new truth about reality catches into gear?

Kepler knew what we habitually forget—that the locus of possibility expands when the unimaginable is imagined and then made real through systematic effort.

empathy would come into popular use three centuries later, through the gateway of art, when it entered the modern lexicon in the early twentieth century to describe the imaginative act of projecting oneself into a painting in

an effort to understand why art moves us.

before the poet Muriel Rukeyser wrote that “the universe is made of stories, not of atoms,”

“Once a poem is made available to the public, the right of interpretation belongs to the reader,”

those who stand to gain from the manipulation of truth often prey on those bereft of critical thinking.

Galileo, who was right about so much, was also wrong about so much—something worth remembering as we train ourselves in the cultural acrobatics of nuanced appreciation without idolatry.

poetry’s highest task is “to awaken sleepers by other means than shock.”

Kepler had spoken in the native tongue of the universe: mathematics.

won’t you celebrate with me what i have shaped into a kind of life? i had no model. [. . .] i made it up here on this bridge between starshine and clay

“We cannot accept anything as granted beyond the first mathematical formulae. Question everything else.”