Emir Kamenica

The right reason to go to college is so you can find new ways to awe yourself by reflecting on how fascinating the world we live in is. We are actually on a giant rock hurling through space. It's a crazy interesting world we are living in.

Trees, as it turns out, grow out of the air, not out of the ground! That is a beautiful thing to contemplate. And getting the special glasses that allow me to look at the world this way, well for me, that is a really good reason that I went to college.

These stories we tell about ourselves — they're almost like our infrastructure, like railroads or highways. We can build them almost any way we want to. But once they're in place, this whole inner landscape grows up around them.