Philosophy Quote of the Day

I’m planning an op-ed on education, that has to do with how we often focus intensely on some details while forgetting our goal. That reminded me of an often quoted line from Nietzsche. The usual way we see it, it reads: “Forgetting one’s purpose is the commonest forms of stupidity.”

I like that version too, but the scholar in me goes a bit nuts when I can’t actually track down the source of a quote. So, I looked for and found the original version of this in Nietzsche’s Human, All Too Human, volume 2, number 206. The translation in the English version from Oxford is what I included in the photo. To put it in text too, it reads:

“Forgetting our objectives is the most frequent of all acts of stupidity.”

You can check it out for yourself in Google Books.