Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality

“This preface is late, but not too late—what, after all, do five or six years matter? A book like this, a problem like this, is in no hurry; we both, I just as much as my book, are friends of lento. It is not for nothing that I have been a philologist, perhaps I am a philologist still, that is to say, a teacher of slow reading:—in the end I also write slowly. Nowadays it is not only my habit, it is also to my tasts—a malicious taste, perhaps?—no longer to write anything which does not reduce to despair every sort of man who is ‘in a hurry’. For philology is that venerable art which demands of its votaries one thing above all: to go aside, to take time, to become still, to become slow—it is a goldsmith’s art and connoisseurship of the word which has nothing but delicate, cautious work to do and achieves nothing if it does not achieve it lento. But for precisely this reason is it more necessary than ever today, by precisely this means does it entice and enchant us the most, in the midst of an age of “work," that is to say, of hurry, of indecent and perspiring haste, which wants to “get everything done" at once, including every old or new book: —this art does not easily get anything done, it teaches to read well, that is to say, to read slowly, deeply, looking cautiously before and aft, with reservations, with doors left open, with delicate eyes and fingers…”
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality, p. 5.