The inhumanity of the sage. -- Since the progress of the sage, who, as the Buddhist hymn says, 'walks alone like the rhinoceros,' is heavy and crushes all in its path -- there is need from time to time of a sign of a conciliatory and gentler humanity: and by that I mean, not just a swifter progress, a tactfulness and companionableness, not only a display of wit and a certain self-mockery, but a self-contradiction and an occasional regression into the nonsense currently fashionable. If he is not to resemble a steamroller which advances like fatality, the sage who wants to teach has to employ his faults as an extenuation, and when he says 'despise me!' he pleads for permission to be the advocate of a presumptuous truth.

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- Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak, §469