Let the youthful soul look back on life with the question: what has drawn your soul aloft, what has mastered it and at the same time blessed it? Set up these revered objects before you and perhaps their nature and their sequence will give you a law, the fundamental law of your own true self. Compare these objects one with another, see how one completes, expands, surpasses, transfigures another, how they constitute a stepladder upon which you have clambered up to yourself as you are now.

Friedrich Nietzsche, cited at Pejmanesque, Thought for the Day (Nov. 8, 2004)

NB: I try to wait a while before posting a quote from another site in its entirety, as here.  It doesn't seem fair to do that immediately, thereby stealing the thunder of the party that originally posted the quote.  Still, I'm pretty sure that Pejman has little to worry about with regard to me stealing his thunder.  His is a cool site.  I visit it often, just to see his collection of sometimes-political, sometimes-literary, posts.