Thus Spoke Zarathustra

price for which you live! For only the temporary coming-into-existence of such humans also justifies your existence! Without them, your existence is void; but their existence, too, is almost in vain without a resonance from related souls. — And here is the point from which the circle of your duties toward true culture grows. You know all too well how everything great (precisely because it is not small) has everything against it that is small, that indulges in tradition, that is not gifted and strong enough to learn anew. Usually, greatness, upon its appearance, even stands in contradiction to what was previously known in its own way: greatness is at first, in some sense, a "crime." Now, all institutions — the scientific, artistic, political, religious — by no means aim at the production of exceptional phenomena: rather, they aim at the rule, at the "normal," at the mediocre. If an innovator appears who smashed the inherited world of the mind cyclopeanly into pieces and rebuilt it according to his own most genuine image — a genius — then the people of those institutions are conspired against him. Only slowly and on the long detour of gradually increasing followers does the genius also penetrate those institutions. They must be conservative, these institutions: for there must also be stubbornly remaining powers in the world, corresponding to the incapacities and capacities of people who cannot be further developed, that is, the many. But alongside this, there must always be great exceptions if the life of a people is not to freeze into a mummy or dissolve into a flat swamp of commonality. And if you are not great exceptions yourselves, then be at least small ones! preserve on earth the sacred fire from which genius can rise! preserve the longing for it, the spirit with which it wishes to be greeted! — so that when it comes as a great wave over the surface, it may take you up and grow itself to an even higher height than alone! With that, you take part in the Uebermensch Overman, with that you receive the consecration of higher culture, with that you save humanity from withering, from sinking down into equality, into the stupid, the wretched, the disgusting."

Confucius taught: "There is a heavenly and an earthly nobility. Righteousness, love of truth, the recognizing and striving for the great and holy, together with the tireless joy in these virtues — this is heavenly nobility. The