Two passages from The Gay Science:

Two happy ones. — Certainly this man, notwithstanding his youth, understands the improvisation of life, and astonishes even the acutest observers. For it seems that he never makes a mistake, although he constantly plays the most hazardous games. One is reminded of the improvising masters of the musical art, to whom even the listeners would fain ascribe a divine infallibility of the hand, notwithstanding that they now and then make a mistake, as every mortal is liable to do. But they are skilled and inventive, and always ready in a moment to arrange into the structure of the score the most accidental tone (where the jerk of a finger or a humor brings it about), and to animate the accident with a fine meaning and soul.

Here is quite a different man: every thing that he intends and plans fails with him in the long run. That on which he has now and again set his heart has already brought him several times to the abyss, and to the very verge of ruin; and if he has I as yet got out of the scrape, it certainly has not been merely with a “black eye.” Do you think that he is unhappy over it? He resolved long ago not to regard his own wishes and plans as of so much importance. “If this does not succeed with me,” he says to himself, “perhaps that will succeed; and on the whole I do not know but that I am under more obligation to thank my failures than any of my successes. Am I made to be headstrong, and to wear the bull’s horns? That which constitutes the worth and the sum of life for me, lies somewhere else; I know more of life, because I have been so often on the point of losing it; and just on that account I have more of life than any of you!”

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In media vita (In mid-life). — No, life has not disappointed me! On the contrary, I find it truer, more desirable and mysterious every year, — ever since the day when the great liberator came to me, the idea that life could be an experiment of the seeker for knowledge — and not a duty, not a calamity, not a trickery! — And knowledge itself: let it be something else for others, for example, a bed to rest on, or the way to such a bed, or a diversion, or a form of leisure, — for me it is a world of dangers and victories in which heroic feelings, too, find places to dance and play. “Life as a means to knowledge” — with this principle in one’s heart one can live not only boldly but even gaily and laugh gaily, too! And who knows how to laugh anyway and live well if he does not first know a good deal about war and victory?