Figuring

by Maria Popova

How does a person come into self-possession and sovereignty of mind against the tide of convention and unreasoning collectivism? Does

Throughout life, our habits, beliefs, and ideas evolve beyond recognition.

“It’s part of the nature of man to start with romance and build to a reality.”

The word 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.

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,” young Sylvia Plath

Denise Levertov—the only woman of the fifteen—would state that poetry’s highest task is “to awaken sleepers by other means than shock.”

The Copernican model was the first major idea to challenge our self-importance.

“the mind has no sex.”

in the earthly construction of gender as a function of culture.

It was not his mother’s nature that made her ignorant, but the

consequences of her social standing in a world that rendered its opportunities for intellectual illumination and self-ac...

“There’s only one thing in the world of any real importance, and that is goodness.”

“Mingle the starlight with your lives,” she would later tell her students at Vassar—America’s first class of women astronomers—“and you won’t be fretted by trifles.”

Where does it live, that place of permission that lets a person chart a new terrain of possibility, that makes her dare to believe she can be something other than what her culture tells her she is, and then become what she believes she can? How does something emerge from nothing?

“The spirit of the place

genius loci—“the spirit of a place.”