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“I must address the topic of whether the effort required for excellence worth it. I believe it is—the chief gain is in the effort to change yourself, in the struggle with yourself, and it is less in the winning than you might expect. Yes, it is nice to end up where you wanted to be, but the person you are when you get there is far more important. I believe a life in which you do not try to extend yourself regularly is not worth living—but it is up to you to pick the goals you believe are worth striving for.”
― Richard Hamming, You and Your Research

“Remember—getting published is not the ultimate goal; getting cited is.”
― Joshua Schimel, Writing Science: How to Write Papers That Get Cited and Proposals That Get Funded

“While painting The Last Supper, Leonardo would sometimes stare at the work for an hour, finally make one small stroke, and then leave. He told Duke Ludovico that creativity requires time for ideas to marinate and intuitions to gel. “Men of lofty genius sometimes accomplish the most when they work least,” he explained, “for their minds are occupied with their ideas and the perfection of their conceptions, to which they afterwards give form.” Most of us don’t need advice to procrastinate; we do it naturally. But procrastinating like Leonardo requires work: it involves gathering all the possible facts and ideas, and only after that allowing the collection to simmer.”
― Walter Isaacson, Leonardo Da Vinci

“Ten years of doing everything wrong suddenly became the right idea, the right scene, the right characters, the right day, the right creative time.”
― Ray Bradbury, Zen in The Art of Writing