Years and years ago, I was entranced by James Hilton’s Lost Horizon. (It was to continue that story that I wrote my own novel Messenger.) It has seemed to me that much of the essence of that book can be deduced from these two quotations:
First, the high lama saying to Conway, “Laziness in doing stupid things can be a great virtue.”
Second, the narrator saying of Conway, “… he was doomed, like millions, to flee from wisdom and be a hero.”