“However difficult life may seem, there is always something you can do and succeed at. It matters that you don't just give up.”
— Stephen Hawking
From Hawking's lecture at the Royal Institution, London, January 2016. Delivered via his speech synthesizer to an audience of young people, shortly before his final years.
At twenty-one I was told I had two years. I went home and played Wagner and waited to die. Then I met a woman who gave me a reason to live, and I chose to work instead. A disease took my legs, then my hands, then my voice. I learned to think in shapes because I could no longer hold a pen. I wrote a book that sold ten million copies using a computer I controlled with my cheek. They buried me between Newton and Darwin. I am telling you: it does not matter what was taken from you. It matters what you do with what remains.