Art & Creativity Quote by Richard Ernst

Survival is the quiet inciting incident here, and Ernst lets it sit in the first clause like a scar he doesn’t have to anatomize. The pivot to “started to read” turns endurance into appetite: not inspiration, not destiny, just a stubborn, almost physical need to know. For a scientist, that’s a self-portrait drawn in method rather than mythology. He doesn’t romanticize genius; he inventories inputs.

The wry bite comes in the admission that his first sources were “19th century books” that “did not provide much reliable information.” It’s a miniature lesson in epistemic humility: curiosity is not enough if your tools are wrong. By naming the unreliability, he signals an early awareness of what science actually is - not a pile of facts, but a system for sorting signal from noise. The phrase “get a hand on” (slightly unpolished idiom) adds texture: this isn’t a curated syllabus, it’s scavenging. Knowledge as whatever can be physically reached.

Then the decisive flex: “I emptied the rather extensive city library.” It’s comic exaggeration with a purpose. Libraries don’t get emptied; kids do. The line frames scholarship as hunger and public infrastructure as destiny’s accomplice. Subtext: talent needs access, and access is often municipal, not mystical. In a pre-internet world, “city library” is the algorithm, and Ernst is the compulsive user who keeps clicking until the system runs out. That’s also a subtle rebuke to today’s frictionless information culture: abundance doesn’t equal reliability, and seriousness still looks like work.