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Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche – Ecce Homo

He who knows how to breathe the air of my writings knows that it is an air of the heights, a robust air.  One has to be made for it, otherwise there is no small danger one will catch cold.  The ice is near, the solitude is terrible – but how peacefully all things lie in the light!  How freely one breathes!  How much one feels beneath one!

Philosophy, as I have hitherto understood and lived it, is a voluntary living in ice and high mountains – a seeking after everything strange and questionable in existence, all that has hitherto been excommunicated by morality.  From the lengthy experience afforded by such a wandering in the forbidden I learned to view the origin of moralising and idealising very differently from what might be desirable; the hidden history of philosophers, the psychology of their great names came to light for me – How much truth can a spirit bear, how much truth can a spirit dare?  That became for me more and more the real measure of value