The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
"...Well, I submit that my readers will be mistaken, and that my conviction has nothing whatever to do with the fact that I am under sentence of death. Ask them, just ask them what they all - every one of them - understand by happiness. Oh, you may be sure that Columbus was happy not when he had discovered America but when he was discovering it; you may be sure that the highest moment of his happiness was, perhaps, exactly three days before his discovery of the New World, when, in despair, his mutinous crew all but turned their ship round and sailed back to Europe - sailed back! It was not the New World that was important - it might never have existed for all that it mattered. Columbus died without having really seen it and, as a matter of fact, without knowing that he had discovered it. It is life, life that matters, life alone - the continuous and everlasting process of discovering it - and not the discovery itself!..."