pain and courage

Pain and fear of pain, finally, are the necessary conditions for courage. Creative achievement may seem solitary, even peripheral to society, but there is something genuinely heroic about it. And from an evolutionary perspective it is they who most fully embody that form of heroism which gives force to the whole human project: the heroism of the seeking mind. It is perhaps this sense of heroism that makes creative endeavor so uniquely enjoyable, that justifies all the pain.

Robert Grudin, “The Grace of Great Things”