🎭 Culture 1d ago · Maria Popova

A Life of One’s Own: A Brilliant Young Woman’s Forgotten Field Guide to the Art of Knowing What You Really Want

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A Life of One’s Own: A Brilliant Young Woman’s Forgotten Field Guide to the Art of Knowing What You Really Want
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“I did not know that I could only get the most out of life by giving myself up to it.”

“One must know what one wants to be,” the eighteenth-century French mathematician Émilie du Châtelet wrote in weighing the nature of genius. “In the latter endeavors irresolution produces false steps, and in the life of the mind confused ideas.” And yet that inner knowing is the work of a lifetime, for our confusions are ample and our missteps constant amid a world that is

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