Forum: ell.stackexchange.com
Tags: <quotations>
Title: What does `almost any how` mean?
Question: Here is the quote from Friedrich Nietzsche:   He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.   I don't quite understand it, especially this phrase  almost any how . Can somebody please shed light onto the meaning?

Answers:
sents: text: He who has a WHY to live can bear almost any HOW (to live)
text: It's a very colloquial way of saying He who has a REASON to live can bear almost any MANNER of life.
text: If you have a reason or purpose in life, you can endure almost any misery.
text: ADDED, to address orthographic issues raised in the Comments:
text: I have been unable to find the original edition or a critical edition online; but scholarly references appear to use this: Hat man sein w
text: a r
text: u m ?
text: des Lebens, so verträgt man sich fast mit
text: jedem w
text: i
text: e ?
text: –
text: Der Mensch
text: strebt nicht nach Glück; nur der Engländer thut das.
text: There are no quotation marks, but warum?
text: (why?) and wie?
text: (how?) are letterspaced.
text: This is a common emphatic device in German orthography; Bernard Shaw was fond of it, too.
text: Some contemporary writers follow another of Shaw's favorite uses with embedded quotations and capitalise these terms (Warum?
text: Wie?)
text: instead; but in German this marks them as nouns.
text: A translation which preserves Nietzsche's aggressive colloquialism might be: If you have your Why? of life, you can put up with just about any
text: How?
text: —Man doesn't strive for happiness; only the Englishman does that.
text: (The last bit of snark is probably not a nationalist sneer but a joke mocking English philosopher Jeremy Bentham and his ‘felicific calculus’.)
answer_details: author: ell.stackexchange.com/users/32/StoneyB on hiatus
score: 19
sents: text: He who has a 'why' to live can bear almost any 'how'.
text: Loosely interpreted: He who has a reason to live can bear almost any problem.
text: Some images of this quote indicate this as well:
answer_details: author: ell.stackexchange.com/users/18673/Glorfindel
score: 4
sents: text: In the example sentence, why and how are set up in a parallelism, to be understood as: He who has a why to live can bear almost any how to live.
text: Like the original example, this is not actually, formally, grammatically correct.
text: It is a poetic expression.
text: It might be better understood written as: He who has a why-to-live can bear almost any how-to-live.
text: What is "a why-to-live"?
text: Idiomatically, "a why" is a reason , so this means a reason to live.
text: Thus by parallelism (and this is not idiomatic) "
text: a how" is a means , and "any how-to-live" is "any means to live".
text: Thus it poetically and concisely expresses the idea:
text: He who has a reason to live can bear almost any means of living.
answer_details: author: ell.stackexchange.com/users/5890/Codeswitcher
score: 4
sents: text: Nietzsche means that a person with nothing to live for subconsciously prefers death, but someone who has something to live for (the reason WHY he continues to live) can endure almost anything (HOW to survive almost anything).
answer_details: author: ell.stackexchange.com/users/53715/Mattias Orre
score: 2
sents: text: Victor Frankel's, "Mans Search for Meaning
text: " Will explain this quote absolutely.
text: While living through Auschwitz, Frankel discovered that those victims who had meaning in their lives were far more likely to survive than those who did not.
text: When EVERYTHING is taken from you, leaving no possibility of any kind of normal "happiness", if you still had a sense of "why", a sense of meaning, will get you through the day.
answer_details: author: ell.stackexchange.com/users/77079/Robert Wells
score: 2

Summary of the answers:
Nietzsche means that he who has a reason to live can bear almost anything in life.  When EVERYTHING is taken from you, leaving no possibility of any kind of normal "happiness", if you still had a sense of "why", or a sense of meaning,  you would be able to get through the day.  If you have a reason or purpose in life, you can endure almost any misery.
It means that a person who has a reason or purpose in life can endure almost anything.