Inspiration

"Purpose: Find your aim in life before you run out of ammunition."

On thinking ahead, from the novel "Artifact" by Greg Benford, a "hard" sci-fi writer who is also a physicist:

"There was a great mathematician named Hilbert, who telegraphed Berlin saying he had proved the outstanding unsolved problem in mathematics, a thing called Riemann's conjecture.  It has to do with the roots of a well known function.

He sends this telegram to Berlin, where he's going to give a speech.  Everybody gets excited.  So Hilbert shows up and talks, and says nothing about the problem.

Somebody comes up to him after the speech and says, what about Riemann's conjecture, what's the solution?

Hilbert says he hasn't got one.  He was taking his first airplane trip to Berlin, and was pretty nervous, so he sent the telegram in case he got killed."

The truths of Psalm 4 bring relief to those in distress.

"I find the great thing in this world is not so much where we stand, as in what direction we are moving. To reach the port of heaven, we must sail sometimes with the wind and sometimes against it, but we must sail and not drift, nor lie at anchor."
- Oliver Wendell Holmes