Life ought to be a struggle of desire toward adventures whose nobility will fertilize the soul.

In this aphoristic line, West frames a good life not as comfort or mere self-preservation but as an active, even strenuous, pursuit: desire should propel a person toward “adventures” that test and enlarge them. The key qualifier is “nobility”—adventures are valuable not for novelty or thrill, but for their moral and imaginative elevation. The metaphor of fertilization suggests inner growth: experiences that demand courage, integrity, or generosity enrich the psyche and make future insight and feeling possible. The sentence also implies an ethic of chosen difficulty: struggle is not accidental suffering but purposeful striving that yields spiritual and intellectual vitality.