Modern man lives under the illusion that he knows what he wants, while he actually wants what he is supposed to want. – Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom, 1941

I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me. – Isaac Newton (1642–1727), spoken the evening before his death

It is better to emit a scream in the shape of a theory than to be entirely insensible to the jars and incongruities of life and take everything as it comes in a forlorn stupidity. – Robert Louis Stevenson, “Crabbed Age and Youth,” Virginibus Puerisque, 1881