After all the years, after everything that you'd had to endure, after everything that you'd undertaken, however good or bad, long after you'd given up all hope, the reward.

...a butterfly is like the soul of a person, it dries out in captivity.

It is wrong to expect a reward for your struggles. The reward is the act of struggle itself, not what you win.

Believe me, the reward is not so great without the struggle.

The end is not the reward; the path you take, the emotions that course through you as you grasp life - that is the reward.

An example of such emergent phenomena is the origin of life from non-living chemical compounds in the oldest, lifeless oceans of the earth. Here, aided by the radiation energy received from the sun, countless chemical materials were synthesized and accumulated in such a way that they constituted, as it were, a primeval “soup.” In this primeval soup, by infinite variations of lifeless growth and decay of substances during some billions of years, the way of life was ultimately reached, with its metabolism characterized by selective assimilation and dissimilation as end stations of a sluiced and canalized flow of free chemical energy.