“He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.”
Friedrich Nietzsche · Twilight of the Idols, 1889
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The most important thing about a person is always the thing you don't know.
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About this quote
Meaning
This line is a quiet warning against the confidence of first impressions and surface judgments. The most essential truth about any person tends to be exactly what remains hidden, the interior life, the private grief, the formative wound, the secret ambition. What we know about someone is always incomplete, and what we do not know is often the very thing that would change how we see them entirely. The line invites humility in the way we read and assess the people around us.
Context
The Lacuna, published in 2009, is a novel that weaves together fiction and history, following a character whose life intersects with real historical figures and turbulent political events across several decades. Kingsolver is interested throughout the book in questions of identity, narrative, and how stories get told and suppressed. A line like this fits naturally into that preoccupation, drawing attention to the gap between what is visible and what is real in any human story.
About the author
Barbara Kingsolver is an American novelist and essayist known for fiction that engages seriously with politics, ecology, history, and social justice. She has written numerous novels, and her work has been translated into many languages and read widely around the world. The Lacuna received the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2010. Kingsolver's writing is consistently praised for the depth of its characterization and its willingness to ask difficult questions about how individuals and societies make sense of themselves.
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