A novelist is an elephant, but an elephant who must pretend to forget. - Hannah Arendt

What's the use of falling in love if you both remain inertly as you were?

It is, I think, safe to say that nothing was more alien to the minds of the scientists, who brought about the most radical and most rapid revolutionary process the world has ever seen, than any will to power. Nothing was more remote than any wish to ‘conquer space’ and to go to the moon. It was indeed their search for ‘true reality’ that led them to lose confidence in appearances, in the phenomena as they reveal themselves of their own accord to human sense and reason. They were inspired by an extraordinary love of harmony and lawfulness which taught them that they would have to step outside any merely given sequence or series of occurrences if they wanted to discover the overall beauty and order of the whole, that is, the universe.

You can date the evolving life of a mind, like the age of a tree, by the rings of friendship formed by the expanding central trunk.