The first question which you will ask and which I must try to answer is this, "What is the use of climbing Mount Everest?" And my answer must at once be, "It is no use." We shall not bring back a single bit of gold or silver, not a gem, nor any coal or iron. We shall not find a single foot of earth that can be planted with crops to raise food. So, if you cannot understand that there is something in man which responds to the challenge of this mountain and goes out to meet it, that the struggle is the struggle of life itself forever upward, then you won't see why we go. What we get from this adventure is only sheer joy. And joy is, after all, life. We do not live to eat and make money. We eat and make money in order to enjoy life. That is what life means and what life is for.
George Leigh Mallory

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself"

It's not easy to improvise. It's the most difficult thing to do. Even when one improvises in front of a camera or a microphone one ventriloquizes or leaves another to speak in one's place the schemas and languages that are already there. There are already a great number of prescriptions that are prescribed in our memory and in our culture. All the names are already preprogrammed. It's already the names that inhibit our ability to ever really improvise. One can't say whatever one wants. One is obliged, more or less, to reproduce the stereotypical discourse. And so I believe in improvisation. And I fight for improvisation. But always with the belief that it's impossible. And there, where there is improvisation I am not able to see myself. I am blind to myself and it's what I will see, no I won't see it, it's for others to see. The one who is improvised here, no, I won't ever see him.
Jacques Derrida

The point of life is to fail at greater and greater things.
Rainer Maria Rilke

How, if some day or night a demon were to sneak after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you, "This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything immeasurably small or great in your life must return to you--all in the same succession and sequence--even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned over and over, and you with it, a dust grain of dust." Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or did you once experience a tremendous moment when you would have answered him, "You are a god, and never have I heard anything more godly." If this thought were to gain possession of you, it would change you, as you are, or perhaps crush you. The question in each and every thing, "Do you want this once more and innumerable times more?" would weigh upon your actions as the greatest stress. Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science