the most critical thing an aspiring writer can do, I think, is to always know why he or she is doing it and for whom. It’s fine to find gratification… - Maria Popova

Bernstein quoted from a speech Kennedy would have delivered a few hours before the assassination: “America’s leadership must be guided by learning and reason.” The loss he said, was only deepened by the awareness that it had been the product of the exact antipodes of learning and reason — “ignorance and hatred.” … “Learning and Reason: those two words of John Kennedy’s were not uttered in time to save his own life; but every man can pick them up where they fell, and make them part of himself, the seed of that rational intelligence without which our world can no longer survive. This must be the mission of every man of goodwill: to insist, unflaggingly, at risk of becoming a repetitive bore, but to insist on the achievement of a world in which the mind will have triumphed over violence.

In science as in romance, the unknown is disrobed sheath by sheath as fervid fantasies imagine the possibilities conquerable by knowledge — fantasies that far outstrip the reality eventually revealed as knowledge progresses.

What is love, after all, if not an affectionate acceptance of the lover's full spectrum of being, the silly along with the solemn?