Nov 3, 2025
To become what one is, one must not have the faintest notion what one is. From this point of view even the blunders of life have their own meaning and value - the occasional side roads and wrong roads, the delays, 'modesties,' seriousness wasted on tasks that are remote from the task. All this can express a great prudence, even the supreme prudence: where Know thyself would be the recipe for ruin, forgetting oneself, misunderstanding oneself, making oneself smaller, narrower, mediocre, become reason itself.
from Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What One Is by Friedrich Nietzsche (1888)
