Beyond Good and Evil: Nietzsche on Love, Perseverance, and the True Mark of Greatness

“A man of genius is unbearable, unless he possess at least two things besides: gratitude and purity.”

“All the goodness and the heroisms will rise up again, then be cut down again and rise up,” John Steinbeck wrote to his best friend on New Year’s Day 1941, as the world was coming undone by its deadliest war. “It isn’t that the evil thing wins — it never will — but that it doesn’t die.”

It is a sentiment both lucid and noble, springing from one of humanity’s most humanistic minds. It is also a...