有时候，成长中最难的部分是意识到自己并非想象中的那个人。

2000年10月29日，在南京大学捐资设立杨振宁奖学金时，杨振宁表示，虽然我父亲是大学教授，但因为通货膨胀，家里很穷，生活很艰苦，是奖学金帮我度过了难关。近几年多次在大陆访问，看到不少青年学生因家境困难而影响学业，感到很伤心，所以就有了这么个想法。杨振宁说

别到处说世界亏欠了你。世界什么都不欠你的，你还没出生它就在这儿了。

Your smarts will come in handy because you will travel in a land of marvels. We humans -- plodding as we are -- will astonish ourselves. We'll invent ways to generate clean energy and a lot of it. Atom by atom， we'll assemble tiny machines that will enter cell walls and make repairs. This month comes the extraordinary but also inevitable news that we've synthesized life. In the coming years， we'll not only synthesize it， but we'll engineer it to specifications. I believe you'll even see us understand the human brain. Jules Verne， Mark Twain， Galileo， Newton -- all the curious from the ages would have wanted to be alive most of all right now. As a civilization， we will have so many gifts， just as you as individuals have so many individual gifts as you sit before me.

The architect must be a poet, but a poet who builds.