"Life is a succession of lessons that you must live to understand. Everything is a riddle, and the key to the riddle is another riddle. There are as many pillows of illusion as there are flakes in a snowstorm." (R. W. Emerson) When he published "The Conduct of Life" in 1860, Ralph Waldo Emerson was already one of the most important intellectuals of the young ... """Life is a succession of lessons that must be lived to understand. Everything is a riddle, and the key to the riddle is another riddle. There are as many pillows of illusion as there are flakes in a snowstorm." (R. W. Emerson) When he published "The Conduct of Life" in 1860, Ralph Waldo Emerson was already one of the most important intellectuals of the young American Republic. In two of his most famous essays, he expresses the tension between will and reality: how to change the world with the strength of ideals in the face of the resistance of natural and social forces. They will have a profound influence on young Nietzsche. As if Emerson's writings had the power to put into action the philosophical thinking of everyone, to make him discover his own way of feeling destiny and illusions, and to make him find, step by step, a way of leading his life.