Free spirits, those who live by knowledge alone, will soon attain the supreme aim of their life and their ultimate position towards society and State, and will gladly content themselves, for instance, with a small post or an income that is just sufficient to enable them to live… He, too, knows the weekdays of restraint, of dependence and servitude. But from time to time there must dawn for him a Sunday of liberty, otherwise he could not endure life… In his mode of life and thought there is a refined heroism, which disdains to offer itself to the veneration of the masses, as its coarser brother does, and tends to go silently through and out of the world.
— Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human
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Is my reader acquainted with the atmosphere in which the observer lives? Is he capable of forgetting himself, forgetting the author, and of letting his soul range widely, as it were, over the things that we observe together? Is he prepared to be carried from calm to stormy seas without abandoning the attitude of the observer? Does he love the whistling of the storm and can he tolerate the outbreaks of rage and contempt? And to repeat: Is he capable, amid all of this, of thinking neither of himself nor of the author? — Well, all right then, I believe I heard him answer “Yes,” and I now will no longer refrain from addressing him.
— Nietzsche, Unpublished Writings from the Period of Unfashionable Observations