“We are not provided with wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can take for us… The lives that you admire, the attitudes that seem noble to you are not the result of training at home, by a father, or by masters at school, they have sprung from beginnings of a very different order, by reaction from the influence of everything evil or commonplace that prevailed round about them. They represent a struggle and a victory.”

Marcel Proust, via The Daily Laws (Page 5)