Get Ready to Get Ready

     A human being who strives for something great considers everyone he meets on his way either as a means or as a delay and obstacle — or as a temporary resting place. His characteristic high-grade graciousness toward his fellow men becomes possible only once he has attained his height and rules. Impatience and his consciousness that until then he is always condemned to comedy — for even war is a comedy and conceals, just as every means conceals the end — spoil all of his relations to others: this type of man knows solitude and what is most poisonous in it.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, #273, p. 222.

     The problem of those who are waiting. — It requires strokes of luck and much that is incalculable if a higher man in whom the solution of a problem lies dormant is to get around to action in time — to “eruption,” one might say. In the average case it does not happen, and in nooks all over the earth sit men who are waiting, scarcely knowing in what way they are waiting, much less that they are waiting in vain. Occasionally the call that awakens — that accident which gives “permission” to act — comes too late, when the best of youth and strength for action has already been used up by sitting still; and many have found to their horror when they “leaped up” that their limbs had gone to sleep and their spirit had become too heavy. “It is too late,” they say to themselves, having lost their faith in themselves and henceforth forever useless.
     Could it be that in the realm of the spirit “Raphael without hands,” taking this phrase in the widest sense, is perhaps not the exception but the rule?
     Genius is perhaps not so rare after all — but the five hundred hands it requires to tyrannize the kairos, “the right time,” seizing chance by its forelock.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Ibid., #274, p. 222.

     Anyone who does not want to see what is lofty in man looks that much more keenly for what is low in him and mere foreground — thus betrays himself.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Ibid., #275, p. 223.

     In all kinds of injury and loss the lower and coarser soul is better off than the nobler one: the dangers for the latter must be greater; the probability that it will come to grief and perish is actually, in view of the multiplicity of the conditions of its life, tremendous.
     In a lizard a lost finger is replaced again; not so in man.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Ibid., #276, p. 223.

     Confucius said, “Study without thought is blind, thought without study is dangerous.”

     Without thought, study is not absorbed; without study, thought is uninformed.
— Thomas Cleary, The Human Element, p. 33.

     Lao-tzu said, “If you agree too easily, you will be little trusted.”

     Try to please everyone and you wind up pleasing no one. Try to be all things to all people and you wind up able to be nothing to anyone. Treasures are hidden because of their value.
— Thomas Cleary, Ibid., p. 67.

     Work on yourself first; take responsibility for your own progress.

     At the outset of an undertaking, when there is potential but no momentum, it may be that all you can do at first is to marshal your own resources and try to develop the capacities and qualities you will need along the way. Without a developed framework of support at this stage, you will need to manage yourself and do your own work, under your own steam. If you rely on others before you have consolidated your own strength and awakened your own faculties, you may tend to become dependent and weak.
— Thomas Cleary, Ibid., p. 79.