Science furthers ability, not knowledge. The value of having rigorously pursued a rigorous science for a time does not exactly derive from the results obtained from it: for these will be a vanishingly small droplet in the ocean of things worth knowing. But there will eventuate an increase in energy, in reasoning capacity, in toughness of endurance; one will have learned how to achieve an objective by the appropriate means. To this extent it is invaluable, with regard to everything one will later do, to have once been a person of science.

— Nietzsche