Just as a waterfall grows slower and more lightly suspended as it plunges down, so the great man of action tends to act with greater calmness than his tempestuous desires prior to the deed would lead one to expect.
I presume that you are compassionate: to be without pity means to be sick in body and spirit. But one should have spirit in abundance, so as to be permitted to be compassionate! For your pity is detrimental to you and to everyone.
When a scholar of the old culture vows no longer to have anything to do with men who believe in progress, he is right. For the old culture has its greatness and goodness behind it, and an historical education forces one to admit that it can never again be fresh.
[Heraclitus had] the highest form of pride [stemming] from a certainty of belief in the truth as grasped by himself alone. He brings this form, by its excessive development, into a sublime pathos by involuntary identification of himself with his truth.
There are expressions and bulls-eyes of the spirit, there are epigrams, a little handful of words, in which a whole culture, a whole society is suddenly crystallized.
All modern philosophizing is political, policed by governments, churches, academics, custom, fashion, and human cowardice, all off which limit it to a fake learnedness.
Man is something that shall be overcome.... Man is a rope, tied between beast and overman -- a rope over an abyss... What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end.