On Scientists

"Most of them are somewhat odd, uncommunicative, solitary fellows, really less like each other, in spite of these common characteristics...

"One of the strongest motives that lead men to art and science is escape from everyday life with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness, from the fetters of one's own shifting desires. A finely tempered nature longs to escape from personal life into the world of objective perception and thought...

"Man tries to make for himself in the fashion that suits him best a simplified and intelligible picture of the world; he then tries to some extent to substitute this cosmos of his for the wold of experience, and thus to overcome it...

"He makes this cosmos and its construction the pivot of his emotional life, in order to find in this way the peace and security which he cannot find in the narrow whirlpool of personal experience."

~Albert Einstein, address on the occasion of Max Planck's 60th birthday delivered at the Physical Society in Berlin


Source: Essays in Science by Albert Einstein, originally published in 1934