The urge to flee from everyday life,

Max Planck asks what leads people to devote their lives to the pursuit of science? That question is difficult to answer and could never be answered in a simple categorical way. Personally I am inclined to agree with Schopenhauer in thinking that one of the strongest motives that lead people to give their lives to art and science is the urge to flee from everyday life, with its drab and deadly dullness, and thus to unshackle the chains of one's own transient desires, which supplant one another in an interminable succession so long as the mind is fixed on the horizon of daily environment. 

But to this negative motive a positive one must be added. Human nature always has tried to form for itself a simple and synoptic image of the surrounding world. In doing this it tries to construct a picture which will give some sort of tangible expression to what the human mind sees in nature. That is what the poet does, and the painter, and the speculative philosopher and the natural philosopher, each in his own way. Within this picture he places the center of gravity of his own soul, so that he will find in it that rest and equilibrium which he cannot find within the narrow circle of his restless personal reactions to everyday life.

I think I understand the above - hope you do,

Max Karl Ernst Ludwig Planck, ForMemRS was a German theoretical physicist whose discovery of energy quanta won him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1918.