One of the strongest motives that lead people to give their lives to art and science is the urge to flee from everyday life, with its drab and deadly dullness and thus to unshackle the chains of one's own transient desires, which supplant one another in an interminable succession so long as the mind is fixed on the horizon of daily environment.

-Einstein, Albert
  Prologue to Max Planck Where is Science Going? (1933).