A great man—a man whom nature has constructed and invented in the grand style—who is he?

First: there is a long logic in all of his activity, hard to survey because of its length, and consequently misleading; he has the ability to extend his will across great stretches of his life and to despise and reject everything petty about him, including even the fairest, “divinest” things in the world.

Second: he is colder, harder, less hesitating, and without fear of “opinion”; he lacks the virtues that accompany respect and “respectability,” and altogether everything that is part of the “virtue of the herd.” If he cannot lead, he goes alone; then it can happen that he may snarl at some things he meets on his way.

Third: he wants no “sympathetic” heart, but servants, tools; in his intercourse with men he is always intent on making something out of them. He knows he is incommunicable: he finds it tasteless to be familiar; and when one thinks he is, he usually is not. When not speaking to himself, he wears a mask. He rather lies than tells the truth: it requires more spirit and will. There is a solitude within him that is inaccessible to praise or blame, his own justice that is beyond appeal.

From Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Will to Power, New York: Vintage Books, 1968, p. 505.