There is a pleasure in the pathless woods, 
There is a rapture on the lonely shore, 
There is society where none intrudes, 
By the deep Sea, and music in its roar: 
I love not Man the less, but Nature more, 
From these our interviews, in which I steal 
From all I may be, or have been before, 
To mingle with the Universe, and feel 
What I can ne'er express, yet cannot all conceal.

-Lord Byron

"I can't do it. It would be like, say, trying to fall in love with somebody, or trying to convince yourself that your favorite food is pancakes. You don't decide those things, they just happen to you. If God is real, He needs to happen to me." - Donald Miller

"Later! What an astonishing idea. What a powerful concept. What a fabulous discovery. How did human beings ever learn to preview in their imaginations chains of events that had not yet come to pass? What prehistoric genius first realized he could escape today by closing his eyes and silently transporting himself into tomorrow?

Unfortunately, even big ideas leave no fossils for carbon dating, and thus the natural history of later is lost to us forever. But paleontologists and neuroanatomists assure us that this pivotal moment in the drama of human evolution happened sometime within the last 3 million years, and that it happened quite suddenly. The first brains appeared on earth about 500 million years ago, spend a leisurely 430 million years or so evolving into the brains of the earliest primates, and another 70 million years or so evolving into the brains of the first protohumans. Then something happened-no one knows quite what, but speculation runs from the weather turning chilly to the invention of cooking- and the soon-to-be human brain experienced an unprecedented growth spurt that more than doubled its mass in a little over two million years, transforming it from the one and a quarter pound brain of Homo habilis to the nearly three pound brain of Homo sapiens....

For the first few hundred million years after their initial appearance on our planet, all brains were stuck in the permanent present, and most brains still are today. But not yours and not mine, because two or three million years ago our ancestors began a great escape from the here and now, and their getaway vehicle was a highly specialized mass of gray tissue, fragile, wrinkled, and appended. This frontal lobe- the last part of the human brain to evolve, the slowest to mature, and the first to deteriorate in old age- is a time machine that allows each of us to vacate the resent and experience the future before it happens. No other animal has a frontal lobe like ours..."

-Daniel Gilbert, PhD on the development of the frontal lobe in humans, which gave us the ability to plan our lives, dream of our futures, and hope for the best. Exquisite.