The wise words of T H White

"The best thing for being sad," replied Merlyn, beginning to puff and blow, "is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and tremble in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honor trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then -- to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the minds can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the thing for you.
Look at what a lot of things there are to learn -- pure science, the only purity there is. You can learn astronomy in a lifetime, natural history in three, literature in six. And then, after you have exhausted a milliard of lifetimes in biology and medicine and theocriticism and geography and history and economics -- why you can start to make a cartwheel out of the appropriate wood, or spend fifty years learning to begin to learn to beat your adversary at fencing. After that you can start again on mathematics, until it is time to learn to plough."

(This is from the Once and Future King which I have read once, and am now enjoying a second time. I love the complicated way in which White say simple things, and the simplicity of his humor. The first two hundred pages focus on the young Arthur's life and education, but in such a way that the "story line" seems to only be a good excuse to relate stories, anecdotes, and general musings. This is the kind of book that I read on the bus and laugh out loud, read at work with dictionary.com pulled up, and read at home into the wee hours of the morning.)