The Will to Power · Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
976.
The reason why philosophers are mostly failures. Because among the conditions which determine them there are qualities which generally ruin other men:-- (1) A philosopher must have an enormous multiplicity of qualities; he must be a sort of abbreviation of man and have all man's high and base desires: the danger of the contrast within him, and of the possibility of his loathing himself; (2) He must be inquisitive in an extraordinary number of ways: the danger of versatility; (3) He must be just and honest in the highest sense, but profound both in love and hate (and in injustice); (4) He must not only be a spectator but a lawgiver: a judge and defendant (in so far as he is an abbreviation of the world); (5) He must be extremely multiform and yet firm and hard. He must be supple. The really _regal_ calling of the philosopher (according to the expression of Alcuin the Anglo-Saxon): "_Prava corrigere, et recta corroborare, et sancta sublimare._" The new philosopher can only arise in conjunction with a ruling class, as the highest spiritualisation of the latter. Great politics, the rule of the earth, as a proximate contingency, the total _lack of principles_ necessary thereto. Fundamental concept: the new values must first be created--this remains _our duty_! The philosopher must be our lawgiver. New species. (How the greatest species hitherto [for instance, the Greeks] were reared: this kind of accident must now be _consciously_ striven for.)
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.