Nick D

“My drafting table, where I drew The Far Side for most of my career, faced a window that overlooked a beautiful garden; beyond the garden was a lake, and beyond the lake Mount Rainier rose majestically into the Washington sky.

I worked at night.”
― Gary Larson, The Complete Far Side

“Unhappiness is not knowing what we want and killing ourselves to get it.” —Don Herold”
― Brendon Burchard, High Performance Habits: How Extraordinary People Become That Way

“If I could do it all over again, and relieve my vision in the twenty-first century, I would become a microbial ecologist. Ten billion bacteria live in a gram of ordinary soil, a mere pinch held in between thumb and forefinger. They represent thousands of species, almost none of which are known to science. Into that world I would go with the aid of modern microscopy and molecular analysis. I would cut my way through clonal forests sprawled across grains of sand, travel in an imagined submarine through drops of water proportionately the size of lakes, and track predators and prey in order to discover new life ways and alien food webs. All this, and I need venture no farther than ten paces outside my laboratory building. The jaguars, ants, and orchids would still occupy distant forests in all their splendor, but now they would be joined by an even stranger and vastly more complex living world virtually without end. For one more turn around I would keep alive the little boy of Paradise Beach who found wonder in a scyphozoan jellyfish and a barely glimpsed monster of the deep.”
― Edward O. Wilson, Naturalist

“scientists, I believe, are divided into two categories: those who do science in order to be a success in life, and those who become a success in life in order to do science. It is the latter who stay active in research for a lifetime.”
― Edward O. Wilson, Naturalist