The Secret of Secrets (Robert Langdon, #6)

by Dan Brown

Einstein had famously declared: Coincidence is God’s way of staying anonymous.

He also knew that this very idea—the notion that human thoughts create reality—existed at the core of most major spiritual teachings.

Immortality through fame, Langdon mused as he took photographs, recalling that Shakespeare, Homer, and Horace had all opined that the uniquely human desire to be “famous” was, in fact, the symptom of another uniquely human trait—our fear of death. To be famous meant you would be remembered long after you died…fame a kind of eternal life.

Embarrassingly, in 1902, the U.S. Army Medical Corps had mistakenly emblazoned the caduceus on their uniforms, and to this day the symbol was displayed in error by U.S. doctors and hospitals.