“
Once upon a time, in some out of the way corner of this universe, poured out and glittering in its innumerable solar systems, there once was a star upon which clever beasts invented knowing. That was the most mendacious and arrogant minute of “world history” – but nevertheless, a mere minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths, the star cooled and congealed, and the clever beasts had to die. One might invent such a fable and still not have illustrated sufficiently how wretched, how shadowy and transient, how aimless and arbitrary the human intellect appears in nature. There have been eternities in which it did not exist, and when it is done for again, when it is all over for the human intellect, then, still, nothing will have happened.
— Friedrich Nietzsche (On Truth & Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense, 1873)
