Your 20s are the most defining decade of your life.
Chemistry is the silent architect of our everyday lives.
"History is not the past—it is the method we have evolved of organizing our ignorance of the past."
I quite agree with them that it is not an ennobling experience. Poverty entails fear, and stress, and sometimes depression; it means a thousand petty humiliations and hardships. Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts, that is indeed something on which to pride yourself, but poverty itself is romanticised only by fools.