“What horrifies me most is the idea of being useless: well-educated, brilliantly promising, and fading out into an indifferent middle age."
- Sylvia Plath

"The scientist does not study nature because it is useful; he studies it because he delights in it, and he delights in it because it is beautiful. If nature were not beautiful, it would not be worth knowing, and if nature were not worth knowing, life would not be worth living.”
- Henri Poincaré