Zoe Zou

“It is not in the still calm of life, or the repose of a pacific station, that great characters are formed,” Abigail Adams wrote to her son John Quincy Adams in the midst of the American Revolution, suggesting that “the habits of a vigorous mind are formed in contending with difficulties. Great necessities call out great virtues.”
― Doris Kearns Goodwin, Leadership: In Turbulent Times

“Don’t focus on it,” she said. “Don’t define yourself in terms of something which even many highly trained and gifted professionals do not fully understand.”
― Elyn R. Saks, The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness

“Then, in the late summer of 1790, Humboldt began to study finance and economics at the academy of trade in Hamburg. He hated it for it was all numbers and account books. In his spare time, Humboldt delved into scientific treatises and travel book, he learned Danish and Swedish - anything was better than his business studies. Whenever he could, he walked down to the River Elbe in Hamburg where he watched the large merchant vessels that brought tobacco, rice and indigo from the United States. The 'sight of the ships in the harbour', he told a friend, was what held him together - a symbol of his hopes and dreams. He couldn't wait to be finally the 'master of his own luck'.”
― Andrea Wulf, The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt's New World

“To value one another is our greatest safety, and to indulge in fear and contempt is our gravest error.”
― Marilynne Robinson, The Givenness of Things: Essays