Every day when you wake up, ask yourself, 'What do I really, really, really want? ' You have to say really, really, really, otherwise you won't believe it.

The mysterious magnet is either there, buried somewhere deep behind the sternum, or it is not.

But, ancient Greece and ancient Rome - people did not happen to believe that creativity came from human beings back then, OK? People believed that creativity was this divine attendant spirit that came to human beings from some distant and unknowable source, for distant and unknowable reasons.

I think I deserve something beautiful.

Given that life is so short, do I really want to spend one-ninetieth of my remaining days on earth reading Edward Gibbon?

I've ruined my eyes, I've ruined my health from my studiousness!

For most of Western civilization there was no real division between the realms of science, divinity, and artistic endeavor - they were just three strands of the same braid, all of them pulling toward the same beautiful desire: to try to understand the workings of this curious and beautiful world. There were many people who would have called themselves all three things at once: men of god, men of science, men of the arts.