The idea of research as leisure activity has stayed with me because it seems to describe a kind of intellectual inquiry that comes from idiosyncratic passion and interest. It’s not about the formal credentials. It’s fundamentally about play . It seems to describe a life where it’s just fun to be reading, learning, writing, and collaborating on idea... See more

"You must cultivate activities that you love. You must discover work that you do, not for its utility, but for itself, whether it succeeds or not, whether you are praised for it or not, whether you are loved and rewarded for it or not, whether people know about it and are grateful to you for it or not. How many activities can you count in your life... See more

through curiosity can reveal people to themselves. But formal education largely remains a vocational enterprise in which, Sir Ken argues, we are being steered away from the things we love “on the grounds that you would never get a job doing that.” Love has been rationalized out of the system of education, but it is central to the deeply personal an

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In a broader sense, this is a book about exploration and discovery. I have long had two favorite proverbs: one is Shaw's "Be sure to get what you like, or else you will have to like what you get," the other a translation from an old Spanish proverb, ""Take what you want,' says God, 'and pay for it.'" To find out what one really wants, and what it c

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they would like to do for its own sake and not because their fathers did it. Most of us who turn to any subject with love remember some morning or evening hour when we got on a high stool to reach down an untried volume, or sat with parted lips listening to a new talker, or for very lack of books began to listen to the voices within as the first tr

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