It is a comfort to me to know that above the steam and filth of human lowlands there is a higher, brighter humanity, very small in number (for everything outstanding is by its nature rare). One belongs to it, not because one is more talented or more virtuous or more heroic or more loving than the men below, but because one is colder, brighter, more far-seeing, more solitary; because one endures, prefers, demands solitude as happiness, as privilege, indeed as a condition of existence; because one lives among clouds and lightning as among one’s own kind, but equally among rays of sunlight, drops of dew, flakes of snow, and everything that necessarily comes from the heights and, when it moves, moves eternally only in the direction from above to below. Aspirations toward the heights are not ours. Heroes, martyrs, geniuses, and enthusiasts are not still, patient, subtle, cold, slow enough for us.

From Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Will to Power, New York: Vintage Books, 1968, p. 517.