Learn English – What does `almost any how` mean

#quotations

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?

Best Answer

He who has a         WHY  to live 
can bear almost any  HOW (to live)

It's a very colloquial way of saying 

He who has a         REASON  to live 
can bear almost any  MANNER  of life.

If you have a reason or purpose in life, you can endure almost any misery.

ADDED, to address orthographic issues raised in the Comments:

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 a r u m ? des Lebens, so verträgt man sich fast mit jedem w i e ? – Der Mensch strebt nicht nach Glück; nur der Engländer thut das.

There are no quotation marks, but warum? (why?) and wie? (how?) are letterspaced. This is a common emphatic device in German orthography; Bernard Shaw was fond of it, too. Some contemporary writers follow another of Shaw's favorite uses with embedded quotations and capitalise these terms (Warum? Wie?) instead; but in German this marks them as nouns.

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 How? —Man doesn't strive for happiness; only the Englishman does that.

(The last bit of snark is probably not a nationalist sneer but a joke mocking English philosopher Jeremy Bentham and his ‘felicific calculus’.)

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