{"collection":"philosophy-ethics","full_text_available":true,"graph_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/v2/api/page/wikisource_Thus_Spake_Zarathustra_Part_Three/graph","html_url":"https://unchartedknowledge.5gfusion.net/v2/page/wikisource_Thus_Spake_Zarathustra_Part_Three","id":"wikisource_Thus_Spake_Zarathustra_Part_Three","license":"Public Domain / CC-BY-SA (see source)","rights_basis":"wikisource_site_inclusion_policy","source":"wikisource","source_url":"https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Thus_Spake_Zarathustra/Part_Three","summary":null,"tags":["Pages_using_center_block_with_align_parameter","Pages_using_center_block_with_max-width_parameter","Subpages"],"text":"THUS SPAKE ZARATHUSTRA\n\n\u00a0\n\nTHIRD PART\n\n\u00a0\n\n\u201cYe look aloft when ye long for exaltation, and I look downward because I am exalted.\n\n\u201cWho among you can at the same time laugh and be exalted?\n\n\u201cHe who climeth on the highest mountains, laugheth at all tragic plays and tragic realities.\u201d\u2014Zarathustra, I., \"Reading and Writing\" (p. 56).\n\n\u00a0\n\n45. The Wanderer\n\nThen, when it was about midnight, Zarathustra went his way over the ridge of the isle, that he might arrive early in the morning at the other coast; because there he meant to embark. For there was a good roadstead there, in which foreign ships also liked to anchor: those ships took many people with them, who wished to cross over from the Happy Isles. So when Zarathustra thus ascended the mountain, he thought on the way of his many solitary wanderings from youth onwards, and how many mountains and ridges and summits he had already climbed.\n\nI am a wanderer and mountain-climber, said he to his heart. I love not the plains, and it seemeth I cannot long sit still.\n\nAnd whatever may still overtake me as fate and experience\u2014a wandering will be therein, and a mountain-climbing: in the end one experienceth only oneself.\n\nThe time is now past when accidents could befall me: and what could now fall to my lot which would not already be mine own!\n\nIt returneth only, it cometh home to me at last\u2014mine own Self, and such of it as hath been long abroad, and scattered among things and accidents.\n\nAnd one thing more do I know: I stand now before my last summit, and before that which hath been longest reserved for me. Ah, my hardest path must I ascend! Ah, I have begun my lonesomest wandering!\n\nHe, however, who is of my nature doth not avoid such an hour: the hour that saith unto him: Now only dost thou go the way to thy greatness! Summit and abyss\u2014these are now comprised together!\n\nThou goest the way to thy greatness: now hath it become thy last refuge, what was hitherto thy last danger!\n\nThou goest the way to thy greatness: it must now be thy best courage that there is no longer any path behind thee!\n\nThou goest the way to thy greatness: here shall no one steal after thee! Thy foot itself hath effaced the path behind thee, and over it standeth written: Impossibility.\n\nAnd if all ladders henceforth fail thee, then must thou learn to mount upon thine own head: how couldst thou mount upward otherwise?\n\nUpon thine own head, and beyond thine own heart! Now must the gentlest in thee become the hardest.\n\nHe who hath always much-indulged himself, sickeneth at last by his much-indulgence. Praises on what maketh hardy! I do not praise the land where butter and honey\u2014flow!\n\nTo learn to look away from oneself, is necessary in order to see many things:\u2014this hardiness is needed by every mountain-climber.\n\nHe, however, who is obtrusive with his eyes as a discerner, how can he ever see more of anything than its foreground!\n\nBut thou, O Zarathustra, wouldst view the ground of eyerything, and its background: thus must thou mount even above thyself\u2014up, upwards, until thou hast even thy stars under thee!\n\nYea! To look down upon myself, and even upon my stars: that only would I call my summit, that hath remained for me as my last summit!\u2014\n\nThus spake Zarathustra to himself while ascending, comforting his heart with harsh maxims: for he was sore at heart as he had never been before. And when he had reached the top of the mountain-ridge, behold, there lay the other sea spread out before him; and he stood still and was long silent. The night, however, was cold at this height, and clear and starry.\n\nI recognise my destiny, said he at last, sadly. Well! I am ready. Now hath my last lonesomeness begun.\n\nAh, this sombre, sad sea, below me! Ah, this sombre nocturnal vexation! Ah, fate and sea! To you must I now go down!\n\nBefore my highest mountain do I stand, and before my longest wandering: therefore must I first go deeper down than I ever ascended:\n\n\u2014Deeper down into pain than I ever ascended, even into its darkest flood! So willeth my fate. Well! I am ready.\n\nWhence come the highest mountains? so did I once ask. Then did I learn that they come out of the sea.\n\nThat testimony is inscribed on their stones, and on the walls of their summits. Out of the deepest must the highest come to its height.\u2014\n\n\u00a0\n\nThus spake Zarathustra on the ridge of the mountain where it was cold: when, however, he came into the vicinity of the sea, and at last stood alone amongst the cliffs, then had he become weary on his way, and eagerer than ever before.\n\nEverything as yet sleepeth, said he; even the sea sleepeth. Drowsily and strangely doth its eye gaze upon me.\n\nBui it breatheth warmly\u2014I feel it. And I feel also that it dreameth. It tosseth about dreamily on hard pillows.\n\nHark! Hark! How it groaneth with evil recollections! Or evil expectations?\n\nAh, I am sad along with thee, thou dusky monster, and angry with myself even for thy sake.\n\nAh, that my hand hath not strength enough! Gladly, indeed, would I free thee from evil dreams!\u2014\n\n\u00a0\n\nAnd while Zarathustra thus spake, he laughed at himself with melancholy and bitterness. What! Zarathustra, said he, wilt thou even sing consolation to the sea?\n\nAh, thou amiable fool, Zarathustra, thou too-blindly confiding one! But thus hast thou ever been: ever hast thou approached confidently all that is terrible.\n\nEvery monster wouldst thou caress. A whiff of warm breath, a little soft tuft on its paw:\u2014and immediately wert thou ready to love and lure it.\n\nLove is the danger of the lonesomest one, love to anything, if it only live! Laughable, verily, is my folly and my modesty in love!\u2014\n\n\u00a0\n\nThus spake Zarathustra, and laughed thereby a second time. Then, however, he thought of his abandoned friends\u2014and as if he had done them a wrong with his thoughts, he upbraided himself because of his thoughts. And forthwith it came to pass that the laugher wept\u2014with anger and longing wept Zarathustra bitterly.\n\n\u00a0\n\n46. The Vision and the Enigma\n\n\u00a0\n\n1\n\nWhen it got abroad among the sailors that Zarathustra was on board the ship\u2014for a man who came from the Happy Isles had gone on board along with him,\u2014there was great curiosity and expectation. But Zarathustra kept silent for two days, and was cold and deaf with sadness; so that he neither answered looks nor questions. On the evening of the second day, however, he again opened his ears, though he still kept silent: for there were many curious and dangerous things to be heard on board the ship, which came from afar, and was to go still further. Zarathustra, however, was fond of all those who make distant voyages, and dislike to live without danger. And behold! when listening, his own tongue was at last loosened, and the ice of his heart broke. Then did he begin to speak thus:\n\nTo you, the daring venturers and adventurers, and whoever hath embarked with cunning sails upon frightful seas,\u2014\n\nTo you the enigma-intoxicated, the twilight-enjoyers, whose souls are allured by flutes to every treacherous gulf:\n\n\u2014For ye dislike to grope at a thread with cowardly hand: and where ye can divine, there do ye hate to calculate\u2014\n\nTo you only do I tell the enigma that I saw\u2014the vision of the lonesomest one.\u2014\n\nGloomily walked I lately in corpse-coloured twilight\u2014gloomily and sternly, with compressed lips. Not only one sun had set for me.\n\nA path which ascended daringly among boulders, an evil, lonesome path, which neither herb nor shrub any longer cheered, a mountain-path, crunched under the daring of my foot.\n\nMutely marching over the scornful clinking of pebbles, trampling the stone that let it slip: thus did my foot force its way upwards.\n\nUpwards:\u2014in spite of the spirit that drew it downwards, towards the abyss, the spirit of gravity, my devil and arch-enemy.\n\nUpwards:\u2014although it sat upon me, half-dwarf, half-mole; paralysed, paralysing; dripping lead in mine ear, and thoughts like drops of lead into my brain.\n\n\u201cO Zarathustra,\u201d it whispered scornfully, syllable by syllable, \u201cthou stone of wisdom! Thou threwest thyself high, but every thrown stone must\u2014fall!\n\nO Zarathustra, thou stone of wisdom, thou sling-stone, thou star-destroyer! Thyself threwest thou so high,\u2014but every thrown stone\u2014must fall!\n\nCondemned of thyself, and to thine own stoning: O Zarathustra, far indeed threwest thou thy stone\u2014but upon thyself will it recoil!\u201d\n\nThen was the dwarf silent; and it lasted long. The silence, however, oppressed me; and to be thus in pairs, one is verily lonesomer than when alone!\n\nI ascended, I ascended, I dreamt, I thought,\u2014but everything oppressed me. A sick one did I resemble, whom bad torture wearieth, and a worse dream reawakeneth out of his first sleep.\u2014\n\nBut there is something in me which I call courage: it hath hitherto slain for me every dejection. This courage at last bade me stand still and say: \u201cDwarf! Thou! Or I!\u201d\u2014\n\nFor courage is the best slayer,\u2014courage which attacketh: for in every attack there is sound of triumph.\n\nMan, however, is the most courageous animal: thereby hath he overcome every animal. With sound of triumph hath he overcome every pain; human pain, however, is the sorest pain.\n\nCourage slayeth also giddiness at abysses: and where doth man not stand at abysses! Is not seeing itseif\u2014seeing abysses?\n\nCourage is the best slayer: courage slayeth also fellow-suffering. Fellow-suffering, however, is the deepest abyss: as deeply as man looketh into life, so deeply also doth he look into suffering.\n\nCourage, however, is the best slayer, courage which attacketh: it slayeth even death itself; for it saith: \u201cWas that life? Well! Once more!\u201d\n\nIn such speech, however, there is much sound of triumph. He who hath ears to hear, let him hear.\u2014\n\n\u00a0\n\n2\n\n\u201cHalt, dwarf!\u201d said I. \u2018Either I\u2014or thou! I, however, am the stronger of the two:\u2014thou knowest not mine abysmal thought! It\u2014couldst thou not endure!\u201d\n\nThen happened that which made me lighter: for the dwarf sprang from my shoulder, the prying sprite! And it squatted on a stone in front of me. There was however a gateway just where we halted.\n\n\u201cLook at this gateway! Dwarf!\u201d I continued, \u201cit hath two faces. Two roads come together here: these hath no one yet gone to the end of.\n\nThis long lane backwards: it continueth for an eternity. And that long lane forward\u2014that is another eternity.\n\nThey are antithetical to one another, these roads; they directly abut on one another:\u2014and it is here, at this gateway that they come together. The name of the gateway is inscribed above: \u2018This Moment.\u2019\n\nBut should one follow them further\u2014and ever further and further on, thinkest thou, dwarf, that these roads would be eternally antithetical?\u201d\u2014\n\n\u201cEverything straight lieth,\u201d murmured the dwarf, contemptuously. \u201cAll truth is crooked; time itself is a circle.\u201d\n\n\u201cThou spirit of gravity!\u201d said I wrathfully, \u201cdo not take it too lightly! Or I shall let thee squat where thou squattest, Haltfoot,\u2014and I carried thee high!\u201d\n\n\u201cObserve,\u201d continued I, \u201cThis Moment! From the gateway, This Moment, there runneth a long eternal lane backwards: behind us lieth an eternity.\n\nMust not whatever can run its course of all things, have already run along that lane? Must not whatever can happen of all things have already happened, resulted, and gone by?\n\nAnd if everything has already existed, what thinkest thou, dwarf, of This Moment? Must not this gateway also\u2014have already existed?\n\nAnd are not all things closely bound together in such wise that This Moment draweth all coming things after it? Consequently\u2014itself also?\n\nFor whatever can run its course of all things, also in this long lane outward\u2014must it once more run!\u2014\n\nAnd this slow spider which creepeth in the moonlight, and this moonlight itself, and thou and I in this gateway whispering together, whispering of eternal things\u2014must we not all have already existed?\n\n\u2014And must we not return and run in that other lane out before us, that long weird lane\u2014must we not eternally return?\u201d\u2014\n\nThus did I speak, and always more softly: for I was afraid of mine own thoughts, and arrear-thoughts. Then, suddenly did I hear a dog howl near me.\n\nHad I ever heard a dog howl thus? My thoughts ran back. Yes! When I was a child, in my most distant childhood:\n\n\u2014Then did I hear a dog howl thus. And saw it also, with hair bristling, its head upwards, trembling in the stillest midnight, when even dogs believe in ghosts:\n\n\u2014So that it excited my commiseration. For just then went the full moon, silent as death, over the house; just then did it stand still, a glowing globe\u2014at rest on the flat roof, as if on some one\u2019s property:\u2014\n\nThereby had the dog been terrified: for dogs believe in thieves and ghosts. And when I again heard such howling, then did it excite my commiseration once more.\n\nWhere was now the dwarf? And the gateway? And the spider? And all the whispering? Had I dreamt? Had I awakened? \u2019Twixt rugged rocks did I suddenly stand alone, dreary in the dreariest moonlight.\n\nBut there lay a man! And there! The dog leaping, bristling, whining\u2014now did it see me coming\u2014then did it howl again, then did it cry:\u2014had I ever heard a dog cry so for help?\n\nAnd verily, what I saw, the like had I never seen. A young shepherd did I see, writhing, choking, quivering, with distorted countenance, and with a heavy black serpent hanging out of his mouth.\n\nHad I ever seen so much loathing and pale horror on one countenance? He had perhaps gone to sleep? Then had the serpent crawled into his throat\u2014there had it bitten itself fast.\n\nMy hand pulled at the serpent, and pulled:\u2014in vain! I failed to pull the serpent out of his throat. Then there cried out of me: \u201cBite! Bite!\n\nIts head off! Bite!\u201d\u2014so cried it out of me; my horror, my hatred, my loathing, my pity, all my good and my bad cried with one voice out of me.\u2014\n\nYe daring ones around me! Ye venturers and adventurers, and whoever of you have embarked with cunning sails on unexplored seas! Ye enigma-enjoyers!\n\nSolve unto me the enigma that I then beheld, interpret unto me the vision of the lonesomest one!\n\nFor it was a vision and a foresight:\u2014what did I then behold in parable? And who is it that must come some day?\n\nWho is the shepherd into whose throat the serpent thus crawled? Who is the man into whose throat all the heaviest and blackest will thus crawl?\n\n\u2014The shepherd however bit as my cry had admonished him; he bit with a strong bite! Far away did he spit the head of the serpent:\u2014and sprang up.\u2014\n\nNo longer shepherd, no longer man\u2014a transfigured being, a light-surrounded being, that laughed! Never on earth laughed a man as he laughed!\n\nO my brethren, I heard a laughter which was no human laughter,\u2014and now gnaweth a thirst at me, a longing that is never allayed.\n\nMy longing for that laughter gnaweth at me: oh, how can I still endure to live! And how could I endure to die at present!\u2014\n\n\u00a0\n\nThus spake Zarathustra.\n\n\u00a0\n\n47. Involuntary Bliss\n\nWith such enigmas and bitterness in his heart did Zarathustra sail o\u2019er the sea. When, however, he was four day-journeys from the Happy Isles and from his friends, then had he surmounted all his pain:\u2014triumphantly and with firm foot did he again accept his fate. And then talked Zarathustra in this wise to his exulting conscience:\n\n\u00a0\n\nAlone am I again, and like to be so, alone with the pure heaven, and the open sea; and again is the afternoon around me.\n\nOn an afternoon did I find my friends for the first time; on an afternoon, also, did I find them a second time:\u2014at the hour when all light becometh stiller.\n\nFor whatever happiness is still on its way \u2019twixt heaven and earth, now seeketh for lodging a luminous soul: with happiness hath all light now become stiller.\n\nO afternoon of my life! Once did my happiness also descend to the valley that it might seek a lodging: then did it find those open hospitable souls.\n\nO afternoon of my life! What did I not surrender that I might have one thing: this living plantation of my thoughts, and this dawn of my highest hope!\n\nCompanions did the creating one once seek, and children of his hope: and lo, it turned out that he could not find them, except he himself should first create them.\n\nThus am I in the midst of my work, to my children going, and from them returning: for the sake of his children must Zarathustra perfect himself.\n\nFor in one\u2019s heart one loveth only one\u2019s child and one\u2019s work; and where there is great love to oneself, then is it the sign of pregnancy: so have I found it.\n\nStill are my children verdant in their first spring, standing nigh one another, and shaken in common by the winds, the trees of my garden and of my best soil.\n\nAnd verily, where such trees stand beside one another, there are Happy Isles!\n\nBut one day will I take them up, and put each by itself alone: that it may learn lonesomeness and defiance and prudence.\n\nGnarled and crooked and with flexible hardness shall it then stand by the sea, a living lighthouse of unconquerable life.\n\nYonder where the storms rush down into the sea, and the snout of the mountain drinketh water, shall each on a time have his day and night watches, for his testing and recognition.\n\nRecognised and tested shall each be, to see if he be of my type and lineage:\u2014if he be master of a long will, silent even when he speaketh, and giving in such wise that he taketh in giving:\u2014\n\n\u2014So that he may one day become my companion, a fellow- creator and fellow-enjoyer with Zarathustra:\u2014such a one as writeth my will on my tables, for the fuller perfection of all things.\n\nAnd for his sake and for those like him, must I perfect myself: therefore do I now avoid my happiness, and present myself to every misfortune\u2014for my final testing and recognition.\n\nAnd verily, it were time that I went away; and the wanderer\u2019s shadow and the longest tedium and the stillest hour\u2014have all said unto me: \u201cIt is the highest time!\u201d\n\nThe word blew to me through the keyhole and said \u201cCome!\u201d The door sprang subtly open unto me, and said \u201cGo!\u201d\n\nBut I lay enchained to my love for my children: desire spread this snare for me\u2014the desire for love\u2014that I should become the prey of my children, and lose myself in them.\n\nDesiring\u2014that is now for me to have lost myself. I possess you, my children! In this possessing shall everything be assurance and nothing desire.\n\nBut brooding lay the sun of my love upon me, in his own juice stewed Zarathustra,\u2014then did shadows and doubts fly past me.\n\nFor frost and winter I now longed: \u201cOh, that frost and winter would again make me crack and crunch!\u201d sighed I:\u2014then arose icy mist out of me.\n\nMy past burst its tomb, many pains buried alike woke up:\u2014fully slept had they merely, concealed in corpse-clothes.\n\nSo called everything unto me in signs: \u201cIt is time!\u201d But I\u2014heard not, until at last mine abyss moved, and my thought bit me.\n\nAh, abysmal thought, which art my thought! When shall I find strength to hear thee burrowing, and no longer tremble?\n\nTo my very throat throbbeth my heart when I hear them burrowing! Thy muteness even is like to strangle me, thou abysmal mute one!\n\nAs yet have I never ventured to call thee up; it hath been enough that I\u2014have carried thee about with me! As yet have I not been strong enough for my final lion-wantonness and playfulness.\n\nSufficiently formidable unto me hath thy weight ever been: but one day shall I yet find the strength and the lion\u2019s voice which will call thee up!\n\nWhen I shall have surmounted myself therein, then will I surmount myself also in that which is greater; and a victory shall be the seal of my perfection!\u2014\n\nMeanwhile do I sail along on uncertain seas; chance flattereth me, smooth-tongued chance; forward and backward do I gaze\u2014, still see I no end.\n\nAs yet hath the hour of my final struggle not come to me\u2014 or doth it come to me perhaps just now? Verily, with insidious beauty do sea and life gaze upon me round about:\n\nO afternoon of my life! O happiness before eventide! O haven upon high seas! O peace in uncertainty! How I distrust all of you!\n\nVerily, distrustful am I of your insidious beauty! Like the lover am I, who distrusteth too sleek smiling.\n\nAs he pusheth the best-beloved before him\u2014tender even in severity, the jealous one\u2014, so do I push this blissful hour before me.\n\nAway with thee, thou blissful hour! With thee hath there come to me an involuntary bliss! Ready for my severest pain do I here stand:\u2014at the wrong time hast thou come!\n\nAway with thee, thou blissful hour! Rather harbour there\u2014with my children! Hasten! and bless them before eventide with my happiness!\n\nThere, already approacheth eventide: the sun sinketh. Away\u2014my happiness!\u2014\n\n\u00a0\n\nThus spake Zarathustra. And he waited for his misfortune the whole night; but he waited in vain. The night remained clear and calm, and happiness itself came nigher and nigher unto him. Towards morning, however, Zarathustra laughed to his heart, and said mockingly: \u201cHappiness runneth after me. That is because I do not run after women. Happiness, however, is a woman.\u201d\n\n\u00a0\n\n48. Before Sunrise\n\nO heaven above me, thou pure, thou deep heaven! Thou abyss of light! Gazing on thee, I tremble with divine desires.\n\nUp to thy height to toss myself\u2014that is my depth! In thy purity to hide myself\u2014that is mine innocence!\n\nThe God veileth his beauty: thus hidest thou thy stars. Thou speakest not: thus proclaimest thou thy wisdom unto me.\n\nMute o\u2019er the raging sea hast thou risen for me to-day; thy love and thy modesty make a revelation unto my raging soul.\n\nIn that thou camest unto me beautiful, veiled in thy beauty, in that thou spakest unto me mutely, obvious in thy wisdom:\n\nOh, how could I fail to divine all the modesty of thy soul! Before the sun didst thou come unto me\u2014the lonesomest one.\n\nWe have been friends from the beginning: to us are grief, gruesomeness, and ground common; even the sun is common to us.\n\nWe do not speak to each other, because we know too much\u2014: we keep silent to each other, we smile our knowledge to each other.\n\nArt thou not the light of my fire? Hast thou not the sister-soul of mine insight?\n\nTogether did we learn everything; together did we learn to ascend beyond ourselves to ourselves, and to smile uncloudedly:\u2014\n\n\u2014Uncloudedly to smile down out of luminous eyes and out of miles of distance, when under us constraint and purpose and guilt stream like rain.\n\nAnd wandered I alone, for what did my soul hunger by night and in labyrinthine paths? And climbed I mountains, whom did I ever seek, if not thee, upon mountains?\n\nAnd all my wandering and mountain-climbing: a necessity was it merely, and a makeshift of the unhandy one:\u2014to fly only, wanteth mine entire will, to fly into thee!\n\nAnd what have I hated more than passing clouds, and whatever tainteth thee? And mine own hatred have I even hated, because it tainted thee!\n\nThe passing clouds I detest\u2014those stealthy cats of prey: they take from thee and me what is common to us\u2014the vast unbounded Yea- and Amen-saying.\n\nThese mediators and mixers we detest\u2014the passing clouds: those half-and-half ones, that have neither learned to bless nor to curse from the heart.\n\nRather will I sit in a tub under a closed heaven, rather wil! I sit in the abyss without heaven, than see thee, thou luminous heaven, tainted with passing clouds!\n\nAnd oft have I longed to pin them fast with the jagged gold-wires of lightning, that I might, like the thunder, beat the drum upon their kettle-bellies:\u2014\n\n\u2014An angry drummer, because they rob me of thy Yea and Amen!\u2014thou heaven above me, thou pure, thou luminous heaven! Thou abyss of light!\u2014because they rob thee of my Yea and Amen.\n\nFor rather will I have noise and thunders and tempest-blasts, than this discreet, doubting cat-repose; and also amongst men do I hate most of all the soft-treaders, and half-and-half ones, and the doubting, hesitating, passing clouds.\n\nAnd \u201che who cannot bless shall learn to curse!\u201d\u2014this clear teaching dropt unto me from the clear heaven; this star standeth in my heaven even in dark nights.\n\nI, however, am a blesser and a Yea-sayer, if thou be but around me, thou pure, thou luminous heaven! Thou abyss of light!\u2014into all abysses do I then carry my beneficent Yea-saying.\n\nA blesser have I become and a Yea-sayer: and therefore strove I long and was a striver, that I might one day get my hands free for blessing.\n\nThis, however, is my blessing: to stand above everything as its own heaven, its round roof, its azure bell and eternal security: and blessed is he who thus blesseth!\n\nFor all things are baptized at the font of eternity, and beyond good and evil; good and evil themselves, however, are but fugitive shadows and damp afflictions and passing clouds.\n\nVerily, it is a blessing and not a blasphemy when I teach that \u201cabove all things there standeth the heaven of chance, the heaven of innocence, the heaven of hazard, the heaven of wantonness.\u201d\n\n\u201cOf Hazard\u201d\u2014that is the oldest nobility in the world; that; gave I back to all things; I emancipated them from bondage under purpose.\n\nThis freedom and celestial serenity did I put like an azure bell above all things, when I taught that over them and through them, no \u201ceternal Will\u201d\u2014willeth.\n\nThis wantonness and folly did I put in place of that Will, when I taught that \u201cIn everything there is one thing impossible\u2014rationality!\u201d\n\nA little reason, to be sure, a germ of wisdom scattered from star to star\u2014this leaven is mixed in all things: for the sake of folly, wisdom is mixed in all things!\n\nA little wisdom is indeed possible; but this blessed security have I found in all things, that they prefer\u2014to dance on the feet of chance.\n\nO heaven above me! thou pure, thou lofty heaven! This is now thy purity unto me, that there is no eternal reason-spider and reason-cobweb:\u2014\n\n\u2014That thou art to me a dancing-floor for divine chances, that thou art to me a table of the Gods, for divine dice and dice-players!\u2014\n\nBut thou blushest? Have I spoken unspeakable things? Have I abused, when I meant to bless thee?\n\nOr is it the shame of being two of us that maketh thee blush!\u2014Dost thou bid me go and be silent, because now\u2014day cometh?\n\nThe world is deep:\u2014and deeper than e\u2019er the day could read. Not everything may be uttered in presence of day. But day cometh: so let us part!\n\nO heaven above me, thou modest one! thou glowing one! O thou, my happiness before sunrise! The day cometh: so let us part!\u2014\n\n\u00a0\n\nThus spake Zarathustra.\n\n\u00a0\n\n49. The Bedwarfing Virtue\n\n\u00a0\n\n1\n\nWhen Zarathustra was again on the continent, he did not go straightway to his mountains and his cave, but made many wanderings and questionings, and ascertained this and that; so that he said of himself jestingly: \u201cLo, a river that floweth back unto its source in many windings!\u201d For he wanted to learn what had taken place among men during the interval: whether they had become greater or smaller. And once, when he saw a row of new houses, he marvelled, and said:\n\n\u201cWhat do these houses mean? Verily, no great soul put them up as its simile!\n\nDid perhaps a silly child take them out of its toy-box? Would that another child put them again into the box!\n\nAnd these rooms and chambers\u2014can men go out and in there? They seem to be made for silk dolls; or for dainty-eaters, who perhaps let others eat with them.\u201d\n\nAnd Zarathustra stood still and meditated. At last he said sorrowfully: \u201cThere hath everything become smaller!\n\nEverywhere do I see lower doorways: he who is of my type can still go therethrough, but\u2014he must stoop!\n\nOh, when shall I arrive again at my home, where I shall no longer have to stoop\u2014shall no longer have to stoop before the small ones!\u201d\u2014And Zarathustra sighed, and gazed into the distance\u2014\n\nThe same day, however, he gave his discourse on the bedwarfing virtue.\n\n\u00a0\n\n2\n\nI pass through this people and keep mine eyes open: they do not forgive me for not envying their virtues.\n\nThey bite at me, because I say unto them that for small people, small virtues are necessary\u2014and because it is hard for me to understand that small people are necessary!\n\nHere am I still like a cock in a strange farm-yard, at which even the hens peck: but on that account I am not unfriendly to the hens.\n\nI am courteous towards them, as towards all small annoyances; to be prickly towards what is small, seemeth to me wisdom for hedgehogs.\n\nThey all speak of me when they sit around their fire in the evening\u2014they speak of me, but no one thinketh\u2014of me!\n\nThis is the new stillness which I have experienced: their noise around me spreadeth a mantle over my thoughts.\n\nThey shout to one another: \u201cWhat is this gioomy cloud about to do to us? Let us see that it doth not bring a plague upon us!\u201d\n\nAnd recently did a woman seize upon her child that was coming unto me: \u201cTake the children away,\u201d cried she, \u201csuch eyes scorch children\u2019s souls.\u201d\n\nThey cough when I speak: they think coughing an objection to strong winds\u2014they divine nothing of the boisterousness of my happiness!\n\n\u201cWe have not yet time for Zarathustra\u201d\u2014so they object; but what matter about a time that \u201chath no time\u201d for Zarathustra?\n\nAnd if they should altogether praise me, how could I go to sleep on their praise? A girdle of spines is their praise unto me: it scratcheth me even when I take it off.\n\nAnd this also did I learn among them: the praiser doeth as if he gave back; in truth, however, he wanteth more to be given him!\n\nAsk my foot if their lauding and luring strains please it! Verily, to such measure and ticktack, it liketh neither to dance nor to stand still.\n\nTo small virtues would they fain lure and laud me; to the ticktack of small happiness would they fain persuade my foot.\n\nI pass through this people and keep mine eyes open; they have become smaller, and ever become smaller:\u2014the reason thereof is their doctrine of happiness and virtue.\n\nFor they are moderate also in virtue,\u2014because they want comfort. With comfort, however, moderate virtue only is compatible. To be sure, they also learn in their way to stride on and stride forward: that, I call their hobbling.\u2014Thereby they become a hindrance to all who are in haste.\n\nAnd many of them go forward, and look backwards thereby, with stiffened necks: those do I like to run up against.\n\nFoot and eye shall not lie, nor give the lie to each other. But there is much lying among small people.\n\nSome of them will, but most of them are willed. Some of them are genuine, but most of them are bad actors.\n\nThere are actors without knowing it amongst them, and actors without intending it\u2014, the genuine ones are always rare, especially the genuine actors.\n\nOf man there is little here: therefore do their women masculinise themselves. For only he who is man enough, will\u2014save the woman in woman.\n\nAnd this hypocrisy found I worst amongst them, that even those who command feign the virtues of those who serve.\n\n\u201cI serve, thou servest, we serve\u201d\u2014so chanteth here even the hypocrisy of the rulers\u2014and alas! if the first lord be only the first servant!\n\nAh, even upon their hypocrisy did mine eyes\u2019 curiosity alight; and well did I divine all their fly-happiness, and their buzzing around sunny window-panes.\n\nSo much kindness, so much weakness do I see. So much justice and pity, so much weakness.\n\nRound, fair, and considerate are they to one another, as grains of sand are round, fair, and considerate to grains of sand.\n\nModestly to embrace a small happiness\u2014 that do they call \u201csubmission\u201d! and at the same time they peer modestly after a new small happiness.\n\nIn their hearts they want simply one thing most of all: that no one hurt them. Thus do they anticipate every one\u2019s wishes and do well unto every one.\n\nThat, however, is cowardice, though it be called \u201cvirtue.\u201d\u2014\n\nAnd when they chance to speak harshly, those small people, then do I hear therein only their hoarseness\u2014every draught of air maketh them hoarse.\n\nShrewd indeed are they, their virtues have shrewd fingers. But they lack fists: their fingers do not know how to creep behind fists.\n\nVirtue for them is what maketh modest and tame: therewith have they made the wolf a dog, and man himself man\u2019s best domestic animal.\n\n\u201cWe set our chair in the midst\u201d\u2014so saith their smirking unto me\u2014\u201cand as far from dying gladiators as from satisfied swine.\u201d\n\nThat, however, is\u2014mediocrity, though it be called moderation.\u2014\n\n\u00a0\n\n3\n\nI pass through this people and let fall many words: but they know neither how to take nor how to retain them.\n\nThey wonder why I came not to revile venery and vice: and verily, I came not to warn against pickpockets either!\n\nThey wonder why I am not ready to abet and whet their wisdom: as if they had not yet enough of wiseacres, whose voices grate on mine ear like slate-pencils!\n\nAnd when I call out: \u201cCurse all the cowardly devils in you, that would fain whimper and fold the hands and adore\u201d\u2014then do they shout: \u201cZarathustra is godless.\u201d\n\nAnd especially do their teachers of submission shout this;\u2014but precisely in their ears do I love to cry: \u201cYea! I am Zarathustra, the godless!\u201d\n\nThose teachers of submission! Wherever there is aught puny, or sickly, or scabby, there do they creep like lice; and only my disgust preventeth me from cracking them.\n\nWell! This is my sermon for their ears: I am Zarathustra the godless, who saith: \u201cWho is more godless than I, that I may enjoy his teaching?\u201d\n\nI am Zarathustra the godless: where do I find mine equal? And all those are mine equals who give unto themselves their Will, and divest themselves of all submission.\n\nI am Zarathustra the godless! I cook every chance in my pot. And only when it hath been quite cooked do I welcome it as my food.\n\nAnd verily, many a chance came imperiously unto me: but still more imperiously did my Will speak unto it\u2014then did it lie imploringly upon its knees\u2014\n\n\u2014Imploring that it might find home and heart with me, and saying flatteringly: \u201cSee, O Zarathustra, how friend only cometh unto friend!\u201d\u2014\n\nBut why talk I, when no one hath mine ears! And so will I shout it out unto all the winds:\n\nYe ever become smaller, ye small people! Ye crumbie away, ye comfortable ones! Ye will yet perish\u2014\n\n\u2014By your many small virtues, by your many small omissions, and by your many small submissions!\n\nToo tender, too yielding: so is your soil! But for a tree to become great, it seeketh to twine hard roots around hard rocks!\n\nAlso what ye omit weaveth at the web of all the human future; even your naught is a cobweb, and a spider that liveth on the blood of the future.\n\nAnd when ye take, then is it like stealing, ye small virtuous ones; but even among knaves honour saith that \u201cone shall only steal when one cannot rob.\u201d\n\n\u201cIt giveth itself\u201d\u2014that is also a doctrine of submission But I say unto you, ye comfortable ones, that it taketh to itself, and will ever take more and more from you!\n\nAh, that ye would renounce all half-willing, and would decide for idleness as ye decide for action!\n\nAh, that ye understood my word: \u201cDo ever what ye will\u2014but first be such as can will.\n\nLove ever your neighbour as yourselves\u2014but first be such as love themselves\u2014\n\n\u2014Such as love with great love, such as love with great contempt!\u201d Thus speaketh Zarathustra the godless.\u2014\n\nBut why talk I, when no one hath mine ears! It is still an hour too early for me here.\n\nMine own forerunner am I among this people, mine own cockcrow in dark lanes.\n\nBut their hour cometh! And there cometh also mine! Hourly do they become smaller, poorer, unfruitfuller,\u2014poor herbs! poor earth!\n\nAnd soon shall they stand before me like dry grass and prairie, and verily, weary of themselves\u2014and panting for fire, more than for water!\n\nO blessed hour of the lightning! O mystery before noontide!\u2014Running fires will I one day make of them, and heralds with flaming tongues:\u2014\n\n\u2014Herald shall they one day with flaming tongues: It cometh, it is nigh, the great noontide!\n\n\u00a0\n\nThus spake Zarathustra.\n\n\u00a0\n\n50. On the Olive-Mount\n\nWinter, a bad guest, sitteth with me at home; blue are my hands with his friendly hand-shaking.\n\nI honour him, that bad guest, but gladly leave him alone. Gladly do I run away from him; and when one runneth well, then one escapeth him!\n\nWith warm feet and warm thoughts do I run where the wind is calm\u2014to the sunny corner of mine olive-mount.\n\nThere do I laugh at my stern guest, and am still fond of him; because he cleareth my house of flies, and quieteth many little noises.\n\nFor he suffereth it not if a gnat wanteth to buzz, or even two of them; also the lanes maketh he lonesome, so that the moonlight is afraid there at night.\n\nA hard guest is he,\u2014but I honour him, and do not worship, like the tenderlings, the pot-bellied fire-idol.\n\nBetter even a little teeth-chattering than idol-adoration!\u2014so willeth my nature. And especially have I a grudge against all ardent, steaming, steamy fire-idols.\n\nHim whom I love, I love better in winter than in summer; better do I now mock at mine enemies, and more heartily, when winter sitteth in my house.\n\nHeartily, verily, even when I creep into bed\u2014: there, still laugheth and wantoneth my hidden happiness; even my deceptive dream laugheth.\n\nI, a\u2014creeper? Never in my life did I creep before the powerful: and if ever I lied, then did I lie out of love. Therefore am I glad even in my winter-bed.\n\nA poor bed warmeth me more than a rich one, for I am jealous of my poverty. And in winter she is most faithful unto me.\n\nWith a wickedness do I begin every day: I mock at the winter with a cold bath: on that account grumbleth my stern house-mate.\n\nAlso do I like to tickle him with a wax-taper, that he may finally let the heavens emerge from ashy-grey twilight.\n\nFor especially wicked am I in the morning: at the early hour when the pail rattleth at the well, and horses neigh warmly in grey lanes:\u2014\n\nImpatiently do I then wait, that the clear sky may finally dawn for me, the snow-bearded winter-sky, the hoary one, the white-head,\u2014\n\n\u2014The winter-sky, the silent winter-sky, which often stifleth even its sun!\n\nDid I perhaps learn from it the long clear silence? Or did it learn it from me? Or hath each of us devised it himself?\n\nOf all good things the origin is a thousandfold,\u2014all good roguish things spring into existence for joy: how could they always do so\u2014for once only!\n\nA good roguish thing is also the long silence, and to look, like the winter-sky, out of a clear, round-eyed countenance:\u2014\n\n\u2014Like it to stifle one\u2019s sun, and one\u2019s inflexible solar will: verily, this art and this winter-roguishness have I learned well!\n\nMy best-loved wickedness and art is it, that my silence hath learned not to betray itself by silence.\n\nClattering with diction and dice, I outwit the solemn assistants: all those stern watchers, shall my will and purpose elude.\n\nThat no one might see down into my depth and into mine ultimate will\u2014for that purpose did I devise the long clear silence.\n\nMany a shrewd one did I find: he veiled his countenance and made his water muddy, that no one might see therethrough and thereunder.\n\nBut precisely unto him came the shrewder distrusters and nut-crackers: precisely from him did they fish his best-concealed fish!\n\nBut the clear, the honest, the transparent\u2014these are for me the wisest silent ones: in them, so profound is the depth that even the clearest water doth not\u2014betray it.\u2014\n\nThou snow-bearded, silent, winter-sky, thou round-eyed whitehead above me! Oh, thou heavenly simile of my soul and its wantonness!\n\nAnd must I not conceal myself like one who hath swallowed gold\u2014lest my soul should be ripped up?\n\nMust I not wear stilts, that they may overlook my long legs\u2014all those enviers and injurers around me?\n\nThose dingy, fire-warmed, used-up, green-tinted, ill-natured souls\u2014how could their envy endure my happiness!\n\nThus do I show them only the ice and winter of my peaks\u2014and not that my mountain windeth all the solar girdles around it!\n\nThey hear only the whistling of my winter-storms: and know not that I also travel over warm seas, like longing, heavy, hot south-winds.\n\nThey commiserate also my accidents and chances:\u2014but my word saith: \u201cSuffer the chance to come unto me: innocent is it as a little child!\u201d\n\nHow could they endure my happiness, if I did not put around it accidents, and winter-privations, and bear-skin caps, and enmantling snowflakes!\n\n\u2014If I did not myself commiserate their pity, the pity of those enviers and injurers!\n\n\u2014If I did not myself sigh before them, and chatter with cold, and patiently let myself be swathed in their pity!\n\nThis is the wise waggish-will and good-will of my soul, that it concealeth not its winters and glacial storms; it concealeth not its chilblains either.\n\nTo one man, lonesomeness is the flight of the sick one; to another, it is the flight from the sick ones.\n\nLet them hear me chattering and sighing with winter-cold, all those poor squinting knaves around me! With such sighing and chattering do I flee from their heated rooms.\n\nLet them sympathise with me and sigh with me on account of my chilblains: \u201cAt the ice of knowledge will he yet freeze to death!\u201d\u2014so they mourn.\n\nMeanwhile do I run with warm feet hither and thither on mine olive-mount: in the sunny corner of mine olive-mount do I sing, and mock at all pity.\u2014\n\n\u00a0\n\nThus sang Zarathustra.\n\n\u00a0\n\n51. On Passing-By\n\nThus slowly wandering through many peoples and divers cities, did Zarathustra return by round-about roads to his mountains and his cave. And behold, thereby came he unawares also to the gate of the great city. Here, however, a foaming fool, with extended hands, sprang forward to him and stood in his way. It was the same fool whom the people called \u201cthe ape of Zarathustra:\u201d for he had learned from him something of the expression and modulation of language, and perhaps liked also to borrow from the store of his wisdom. And the fool talked thus to Zarathustra:\n\nO Zarathustra, here is the great city: here hast thou nothing to seek and everything to lose.\n\nWhy wouldst thou wade through this mire? Have pity upon thy foot! Spit rather on the gate of the city, and\u2014turn back!\n\nHere is the hell for anchorites\u2019 thoughts: here are great thoughts seethed alive and boiled small.\n\nHere do all great sentiments decay: here may only rattle-boned sensations rattle!\n\nSmellest thou not already the shambles and cookshops of the spirit? Steameth not this city with the fumes of slaughtered spirit?\n\nSeest thou not the souls hanging like limp dirty rags?\u2014And they make newspapers also out of these rags!\n\nHearest thou not how spirit hath here become a verbal game? Loathsome verbal swill doth it vomit forth!\u2014And they make newspapers also out of this verbal swill.\n\nThey hound one another, and know not whither! They inflame one another, and know not why! They tinkle with their pinchbeck, they jingle with their gold.\n\nThey are cold, and seek warmth from distilled waters: they are inflamed, and seek coolness from frozen spirits; they are all sick and sore through public opinion.\n\nAll lusts and vices are here at home; but here there are also the virtuous; there is much appointable appointed virtue:\u2014\n\nMuch appointable virtue with scribe-fingers, and hardy sitting-flesh and waiting-flesh, blessed with small breast-stars, and padded, haunchless daughters.\n\nThere is here also much piety, and much faithful spittle-licking and spittle-backing, before the God of Hosts.\n\n\u201cFrom on high,\u201d drippeth the star, and the gracious spittle; for the high, longeth every starless bosom.\n\nThe moon hath its court, and the court hath its moon-calves: unto all, however, that cometh from the court do the mendicant people pray, and all appointable mendicant virtues.\n\n\u201cI serve, thou servest, we serve\u201d\u2014so prayeth all appointable virtue to the prince: that the merited star may at last stick on the slender breast!\n\nBut the moon still revolveth around all that is earthly: so revolveth also the prince around what is earthliest of all\u2014that, however, is the gold of the shopman.\n\nThe God of the Hosts of war is not the God of the golden bar; the prince proposeth, but the shopman\u2014disposeth!\n\nBy all that is luminous and strong and good in thee, O Zarathustra! Spit on this city of shopmen and return back!\n\nHere floweth all blood putridly and tepidly and frothily through all veins: spit on the great city, which is the great slum where all the scum frotheth together!\n\nSpit on the city of compressed souls and slender breasts, of pointed eyes and sticky fingers\u2014\n\n\u2014On the city of the obtrusive, the brazen-faced, the pen-demagogues and tongue-demagogues, the overheated ambitious:\u2014\n\nWhere everything maimed, ill-famed, lustful, untrustful, over-mellow, sickly-yellow and seditious, festereth perniciously\u00a0:\u2014\n\n\u2014Spit on the great city and turn back!\u2014\n\n\u00a0\n\nHere, however, did Zarathustra interrupt the foaming fool, and shut his mouth.\u2014\n\nStop this at once! called out Zarathustra, long have thy speech and thy species disgusted me!\n\nWhy didst thou live so long by the swamp, that thou thyself hadst to become a frog and a toad?\n\nFloweth there not a tainted, frothy, swamp-blood in thine own veins, when thou hast thus learned to croak and revile?\n\nWhy wentest thou not into the forest? Or why didst thou not till the ground? Is the sea not full of green islands?\n\nI despise thy contempt; and when thou warnedst me\u2014why didst thou not warn thyself?\n\nOut of love alone shall my contempt and my warning bird take wing; but not out of the swamp!\u2014\n\nThey call thee mine ape, thou foaming fool: but I call thee my grunting-pig,\u2014by thy grunting, thou spoilest even my praise of folly.\n\nWhat was it that first made thee grunt? Because no one sufficiently flattered thee:\u2014therefore didst thou seat thyself beside this filth, that thou mightest have cause for much grunting,\u2014\n\n\u2014That thou mightest have cause for much vengeance! For vengeance, thou vain fool, is all thy foaming; I have divined thee well!\n\nBut thy fools\u2019-word injureth me, even when thou art right! And even if Zarathustra\u2019s word were a hundred times justified, thou wouldst ever\u2014do wrong with my word!\n\n\u00a0\n\nThus spake Zarathustra. Then did he look on the great city and sighed, and was long silent. At last he spake thus:\n\nI loathe also this great city, and not only this fool. Here and there\u2014there is nothing to better, nothing to worsen.\n\nWoe to this great city!\u2014And I would that I already saw the pillar of fire in which it will be consumed!\n\nFor such pillars of fire must precede the great noontide. But this hath its time and its own fate.\u2014\n\nThis precept, however, give I unto thee, in parting, thou fool: Where one can no longer love, there should one\u2014pass by!\u2014\n\n\u00a0\n\nThus spake Zarathustra, and passed by the fool and the great city.\n\n\u00a0\n\n52. The Apostates\n\n\u00a0\n\n1\n\nAh, lieth everything already withered and grey which but lately stood green and many-hued on this meadow! And how much honey of hope did I carry hence into my beehives!\n\nThose young hearts have already all become old\u2014and not oid even! only weary, ordinary, comfortable:\u2014they declare it: \u201cWe have again become pious.\u201d\n\nOf late did I see them run forth at early morn with valorous steps: but the feet of their knowledge became weary, and now do they malign even their morning valour!\n\nVerily, many of them once lifted their legs like the dancer; to them winked the laughter of my wisdom:\u2014then did they bethink themselves. Just now have I seen them bent down\u2014to creep to the cross.\n\nAround light and liberty did they once flutter like gnats and young poets. A little older, a little colder: and already are they mystifiers, and mumblers and mollycoddles.\n\nDid perhaps their hearts despond, because lonesomeness had swallowed me like a whale? Did their ear perhaps hearken yearningly-long for me in vain, and for my trumpet-notes and herald-calls?\n\n\u2014Ah! Ever are there but few of those whose hearts have persistent courage and exuberance; and in such remaineth also the spirit patient. The rest, however, are cowardly.\n\nThe rest: these are always the great majority, the common-place, the superfluous, the far-too many\u2014those all are cowardly!\u2014\n\nHim who is of my type, will also the experiences of my type meet on the way: so that his first companions must be corpses and buffoons.\n\nHis second companions, however\u2014they will call themselves his believers,\u2014will be a living host, with much love, much folly, much unbearded veneration.\n\nTo those believers shall he who is of my type among men not bind his heart; in those spring-times and many-hued meadows shall he not believe, who knoweth the fickly faint-hearted human species!\n\nCould they do otherwise, then would they also will otherwise. The half-and-half spoil every whole. That leaves become withered,\u2014what ts there to lament about that!\n\nLet them go and fall away, O Zarathustra, and do not lament! Better even to blow amongst them with rustling winds,\u2014\n\n\u2014Blow amongst those leaves, O Zarathustra, that everything withered may run away from thee the faster!\u2014\n\n\u00a0\n\n2\n\n\u201cWe have again become pious\u201d\u2014so do those apostates confess; and some of them are still too pusillasimous thus to confess.\n\nUnto them I look into the eye,\u2014before them I say it unto their face and unto the blush on their cheeks: Ye are those who again pray!\n\nIt is however a shame to pray! Not for all, but for thee, and me, and whoever hath his conscience in his head. For thee it is a shame to pray!\n\nThou knowest it well: the faint-hearted devil in thee, which would fain fold its arms, and place its hands in its bosom, and take it easier:\u2014this faint-hearted devil persuadeth thee that \u201cthere is a God!\u201d\n\nThereby, however, dost thou belong to the light-dreading type, to whom light never permitteth repose: now must thou daily thrust thy head deeper into obscurity and vapour!\n\nAnd verily, thou choosest the hour well: for just now do the nocturnal birds again fly abroad. The hour hath come for all light-dreading people, the vesper hour and leisure hour, when they do not\u2014\u201ctake leisure.\u201d\n\nI hear it and smell it: it hath come\u2014their hour for hunt and procession, not indeed for a wild hunt, but for a tame, lame, snuffling, soft-treaders\u2019, soft-prayers\u2019 hunt,\u2014\n\n\u2014For a hunt after susceptible simpletons: all mouse-traps for the heart have again been set! And whenever I lift a curtain, a night-moth rusheth out of it.\n\nDid it perhaps squat there along with another night-moth? For everywhere do I smell small concealed communities; and wherever there are closets there are new devotees therein, and the atmosphere of devotees.\n\nThey sit for long evenings beside one another, and say: \u201cLet us again become like little children and say, \u2018good God!\u2019\u201d\u2014ruined in mouths and stomachs by the pious confectioners.\n\nOr they look for long evenings at a crafty, lurking cross-spider, that preacheth prudence to the spiders themselves, and teacheth that \u201cunder crosses it is good for cobweb-spinning!\u201d\n\nOr they sit all day at swamps with angle-rods, and on that account think themselves profound; but whoever fisheth where there are no fish, I do not even call him superficial!\n\nOr they learn in godly-gay style to play the harp with a hymn-poet, who would fain harp himself into the heart of young girls:\u2014for he hath tired of old girls and their praises.\n\nOr they learn to shudder with a learned semi-madcap, who waiteth in darkened rooms for spirits to come to him\u2014and the spirit runneth away entirely!\n\nOr they listen to an old roving howl- and growl-piper, who hath learned from the sad winds the sadness of sounds; now pipeth he as the wind, and preacheth sadness in sad strains.\n\nAnd some of them have even become night-watchmen: they know now how to blow horns, and go about at night and awaken old things which have long fallen asleep.\n\nFive words about old things did I hear yesternight at the garden-wall: they came from such old, sorrowful, arid night-watchmen.\n\n\u201cFor a father he careth not sufficiently for his children: human fathers do this better!\u201d\u2014\n\n\u201cHe is too old! He now careth no more for his children,\u2019 \u2014answered the other night-watchman.\n\n\u201cHath he then children? No one can prove it unless he himself prove it! I have long wished that he would for once prove it thoroughly.\u201d\n\n\u201cProve? As if he had ever proved anything! Proving is difficult to him; he layeth great stress on one\u2019s believing him.\u201d\n\n\u201cAy! Ay! Belief saveth him; belief in him. That is the way with old people! So it is with us also!\u201d\u2014\n\n\u2014Thus spake to each other the two old night-watchmen and light-scarers, and tooted thereupon sorrowfully on their horns: so did it happen yesternight at the garden-wall.\n\nTo me, however, did the heart writhe with laughter, and was like to break; it knew not where to go, and sunk into the midriff.\n\nVerily, it will be my death yet\u2014to choke with laughter when I see asses drunken, and hear night-watchmen thus doubt about God.\n\nHath the time not long since passed for all such doubts? Who may nowadays awaken such old slumbering, light-shunning things!\n\nWith the old Deities hath it long since come to an end:\u2014and verily, a good joyful Deity-end had they!\n\nThey did not \u201cbegloom\u201d themselves to death\u2014that do people fabricate! On the contrary, they\u2014laughed themselves to death once on a time!\n\nThat took place when the ungodliest utterance came from a God himself\u2014the utterance: \u201cThere is but one God! Thou shalt have no other gods before me!\u201d\u2014\n\n\u2014An old grim-beard of a God, a jealous one, forgot himself in such wise:\u2014\n\nAnd all the gods then laughed, and shook upon their thrones, and exclaimed: \u201cIs it not just divinity that there are gods, but no God?\u201d\n\nHe that hath an ear let him hear.\u2014\n\n\u00a0\n\nThus talked Zarathustra in the city he loved, which is surnamed \u201cThe Pied Cow.\u201d For from here he had but two days to travel to reach once more his cave and his animals; his soul, however, rejoiced unceasingly on account of the nighness of his return home.\n\n\u00a0\n\n53. The Return Home\n\nO Lonesomeness! my home, lonesomeness! Too long have I lived wildly in wild remoteness, to return to thee without tears!\n\nNow threaten me with the finger as mothers threaten; now smile upon me as mothers smile; now say just: \u201cWho was it that like a whirlwind once rushed away from me?\u2014\n\n\u2014Who when departing called out: \u2018Too long have I sat with lonesomeness; there have I unlearned silence!\u2019 That hast thou learned now\u2014surely?\n\nO Zarathustra, everything do I know; and that thou wert more forsaken amongst the many, thou unique one, than thou ever wert with me!\n\nOne thing is forsakenness, another matter is lonesomeness: that hast thou now learned! And that amongst men thou wilt ever be wild and strange:\n\n\u2014Wild and strange even when they love thee: for above all they want to be treated indulgently!\n\nHere, however, art thou at home and house with thyself; here canst thou utter everything, and unbosom all motives; nothing is here ashamed of concealed, congealed feelings.\n\nHere do all things come caressingly to thy talk and flatter thee: for they want to ride upon thy back. On every simile dost thou here ride to every truth.\n\nUprightly and openly mayest thou here talk to all things: and verily, it soundeth as praise in their ears, for one to talk to all things\u2014directly!\n\nAnother matter, however, is forsakenness. For, dost thou remember, O Zarathustra? When thy bird screamed overhead, when thou stoodest in the forest, irresolute, ignorant where to go, beside a corpse:\u2014\n\n\u2014When thou spakest: \u2018Let mine animals lead me! More dangerous have I found it among men than among animals:\u2019 \u2014That was forsakenness!\n\nAnd dost thou remember, O Zarathustra? When thou sattest in thine isle, a well of wine giving and granting amongst empty buckets, bestowing and distributing amongst the thirsty:\n\n\u2014Until at last thou alone sattest thirsty amongst the drunken ones, and wailedst nightly: \u2018Is taking not more blessed than giving? And stealing yet more blessed than taking?\u2019\u2014That was forsakenness!\n\nAnd dost thou remember, O Zarathustra? When thy stillest hour came and drove thee forth from thyself, when with wicked whispering it said: \u2018Speak and succumb!\u2019\u2014\n\n\u2014When it disgusted thee with all thy waiting and silence, and discouraged thy humble courage: That was forsakenness!\u201d\u2014\n\nO lonesomeness! My home, lonesomeness! How blessedly and tenderly speaketh thy voice unto me!\n\nWe do not question each other, we do not complain to each other; we go together openly through open doors.\n\nFor all is open with thee and clear; and even the hours run here on lighter feet. For in the dark, time weigheth heavier upon one than in the light.\n\nHere fly open unto me all beings\u2019 words and word-cabinets: here all being wanteth to become words, here all becoming wanteth to learn of me how to talk.\n\nDown there, however\u2014all talking is in vain! There, forgetting and passing-by are the best wisdom: that have I learned now!\n\nHe who would understand everything in man must handle everything. But for that I have too clean hands.\n\nI do not like even to inhale their breath; alas! that I have lived so long among their noise and bad breaths!\n\nO blessed stillness around me! O pure odours around me! How from a deep breast this stillness fetcheth pure breath! How it hearkeneth, this blessed stillness!\n\nBut down there\u2014there speaketh everything, there is everything misheard. If one announce one\u2019s wisdom with bells, the shopmen in the market-place will out-jingle it with pennies!\n\nEverything among them talketh; no one knoweth any longer how to understand. Everything falleth into the water; nothing falleth any longer into deep wells.\n\nEverything among them talketh, nothing succeedeth any longer and accomplisheth itself. Everything cackleth, but who will still sit quietly on the nest and hatch eggs?\n\nEverything among them talketh, everything is out-talked. And that which yesterday was still too hard for time itself and its tooth, hangeth today, outchamped and outchewed, from the mouths of the men of today.\n\nEverything among them talketh, everything is betrayed. And what was once called the secret and secrecy of profound souls, belongeth to-day to the street-trumpeters and other butterflies.\n\nO human hubbub, thou wonderful thing! Thou noise in dark streets! Now art thou again behind me:\u2014my greatest danger lieth behind me!\n\nIn indulging and pitying lay ever my greatest danger; and all human hubbub wisheth to be indulged and tolerated.\n\nWith suppressed truths, with fool\u2019s hand and befooled heart, and rich in petty lies of pity:\u2014thus have I ever lived among men.\n\nDisguised did I sit amongst them, ready to misjudge myself that I might endure them, and willingly saying to myself: \u201cThou fool, thou dost not know men!\u201d\n\nOne unlearneth men when one liveth amongst them: there is too much foreground in all men\u2014what can far-seeing, far-longing eyes do there!\n\nAnd, fool that I was, when they misjudged me, I indulged them on that account more than myself, being habitually hard on myself, and often even taking revenge on myself for the indulgence.\n\nStung all over by poisonous flies, and hollowed like the stone by many drops of wickedness: thus did I sit among them, and still said to myself: \u201cInnocent is everything petty of its pettiness!\u201d\n\nEspecially did I find those who call themselves \u201cthe good,\u201d the most poisonous flies; they sting in all innocence, they lie in all innocence; how could they\u2014be just towards me!\n\nHe who liveth amongst the good\u2014pity teacheth him to lie. Pity maketh stifling air for all free souls. For the stupidity of the good is unfathomable.\n\nTo conceal myself and my riches\u2014that did I learn down there: for every one did I still find poor in spirit. It was the lie of my pity, that I knew in every one.\n\n\u2014That I saw and scented in every one, what was enough of spirit for him, and what was too much!\n\nTheir stiff wise men: I call them wise, not stiff\u2014thus did I learn to slur over words.\n\nThe grave-diggers dig for themselves diseases. Under old rubbish rest bad vapours. One should not stir up the marsh. One should live on mountains.\n\nWith blessed nostrils do I again breathe mountain-freedom. Freed at last is my nose from the smell of all human hubbub!\n\nWith sharp breezes tickled, as with sparkling wine, sneezeth my soul\u2014sneezeth, and shouteth self-congratulatingly: \u201cHealth to thee!\u201d\n\nThus spake Zarathustra.\n\n\u00a0\n\n54. The Three Evil Things\n\n\u00a0\n\n1\n\nIn my dream, in my last morning-dream, I stood today on a promontory\u2014beyond the world; I held a pair of scales, and weighed the world.\n\nAlas, that the rosy dawn came too early to me: she glowed me awake, the jealous one! Jealous is she always of the glows of my morning-dream.\n\nMeasurable by him who hath time, weighable by a good weigher, attainable by strong pinions, divinable by divine nutcrackers: thus did my dream find the world:\u2014\n\nMy dream, a bold sailor, half-ship, half-hurricane, silent as the butterfly, impatient as the falcon: how had it the patience and leisure to-day for world-weighing!\n\nDid my wisdom perhaps speak secretly to it, my laughing, wide-awake day-wisdom, which mocketh at all \u201cinfinite worlds\u201d? For it saith: \u201cWhere force is, there becometh number the master: it hath more force.\u201d\n\nHow confidently did my dream contemplate this finite world, not new-fangledly, not old-fangledly, not timidly, not entreatingly:\u2014\n\n\u2014As if a big round apple presented itself to my hand, a ripe golden apple, with a coolly-soft, velvety skin:\u2014thus did the world present itself unto me:\u2014\n\n\u2014As if a tree nodded unto me, a broad-branched, strong-willed tree, curved as a recline and a foot-stool for weary travellers: thus did the world stand on my promontory:\u2014\n\n\u2014As if delicate hands carried a casket towards me\u2014a casket open for the delectation of modest adoring eyes: thus did the world present itself before me today:\u2014\n\n\u2014Not riddle enough to scare human love from it, not solution enough to put to sleep human wisdom:\u2014a humanly good thing was the world to me to-day, of which such bad things are said!\n\nHow I thank my morning-dream that I thus at today\u2019s dawn, weighed the world! As a humanly good thing did it come unto me, this dream and heart-comforter!\n\nAnd that I may do the like by day, and imitate and copy its best, now will I put the three worst things on the scales, and weigh them humanly well.\u2014\n\nHe who taught to bless taught also to curse: what are the three best cursed things in the world? These will I put on the scales.\n\nVoluptuousness, passion for power, and selfishness: these three things have hitherto been best cursed, and have been in worst and falsest repute\u2014these three things will I weigh humanly well.\n\nWell! here is my promontory, and there is the sea\u2014it rolleth hither unto me, shaggily and fawningly, the old, faithful, hundred-headed dog-monster that I love!\u2014\n\nWell! Here will I hold the scales over the weltering sea: and also a witness do I choose to look on\u2014thee, the anchorite-tree, thee, the strong-odoured, broad-arched tree that I love! \u2014\n\nOn what bridge goeth the now to the hereafter? By what constraint doth the high stoop to the low? And what enjoineth even the highest still\u2014to grow upwards?\u2014\n\nNow stand the scales poised and at rest: three heavy questions have I thrown in; three heavy answers carrieth the other scale.\n\n\u00a0\n\n2\n\nVoluptuousness: unto all hair-shirted despisers of the body, a sting and stake; and, cursed as \u201cthe world,\u201d by all backworldsmen: for it mocketh and befooleth all erring, misinferring teachers.\n\nVoluptuousness: to the rabble, the slow fire at which it is burnt; to all wormy wood, to all stinking rags, the prepared heat and stew furnace.\n\nVoluptuousness: to free hearts, a thing innocent and free, the garden-happiness of the earth, all the future\u2019s thanks-overflow to the present.\n\nVoluptuousness: only to the withered a sweet poison; to the lion-willed, however, the great cordial, and the reverently saved wine of wines.\n\nVoluptuousness: the great symbolic happiness of a higher happiness and highest hope. For to many is marriage promised, and more than marriage,\u2014\n\n\u2014To many that are more unknown to each other than man and woman:\u2014and who hath fully understood how unknown to each other are man and woman!\n\nVoluptuousness:\u2014but I will have hedges around my thoughts, and even around my words, lest swine and libertine should break into my gardens!\u2014\n\nPassion for power: the glowing scourge of the hardest of the heart-hard; the cruel torture reserved for the cruellest themselves; the gloomy flame of living pyres.\n\nPassion for power: the wicked gadfly which is mounted on the vainest peoples; the scorner of all uncertain virtue; which rideth on every horse and on every pride.\n\nPassion for power: the earthquake which breaketh and up-breaketh all that is rotten and hollow; the rolling, rumbling, punitive demolisher of whited sepulchres; the flashing interrogative-sign beside premature answers.\n\nPassion for power: before whose glance man creepeth and croucheth and drudgeth, and becometh lower than the serpent and the swine:\u2014until at last great contempt crieth out of him\u2014,\n\nPassion for power: the terrible teacher of great contempt, which preacheth to their face to cities and empires: \u201cAway with thee!\u201d\u2014until a voice crieth out of themselves: \u201cAway with me!\u201d\n\nPassion for power: which, however, mounteth alluringly even to the pure and lonesome, and up to self-satisfied elevations, glowing like a love that painteth purple felicities alluringly on earthly heavens.\n\nPassion for power: but who would call it passion, when the height longeth to stoop for power! Verily, nothing sick or diseased is there in such longing and descending!\n\nThat the lonesome height may not forever remain lonesome and self-sufficing; that the mountains may come to the valleys and the winds of the heights to the plains:\u2014\n\nOh, who could find the right prenomen and honouring name for such longing! \u201cBestowing virtue\u201d\u2014thus did Zarathustra once name the unnamable.\n\nAnd then it happened also,\u2014and verily, it happened for the first time!\u2014that his word blessed selfishness, the wholesome, healthy selfishness, that springeth from the powerful soul:\u2014\n\n\u2014From the powerful soul, to which the high body appertaineth, the handsome, triumphing, refreshing body, around which everything becometh a mirror:\n\n\u2014The pliant, persuasive body, the dancer, whose symbol and epitome is the self-enjoying soul. Of such bodies and souls the self-enjoyment calleth itself \u201cvirtue.\u201d\n\nWith its words of good and bad doth such self-enjoyment shelter itself as with sacred groves; with the names of its happiness doth it banish from itself everything contemptible.\n\nAway from itself doth it banish everything cowardly; it saith: \u201cBad\u2014that is cowardly!\u201d Contemptible seem to it the ever-solicitous, the sighing, the complaining, and whoever pick up the most trifling advantage.\n\nIt despiseth also all bitter-sweet wisdom: for verily, there is also wisdom that bloometh in the dark, a night-shade wisdom, which ever sigheth: \u201cAll is vain!\u201d\n\nShy distrust is regarded by it as base, and every one who wanteth oaths instead of looks and hands: also all over-distrustful wisdom,\u2014for such is the mode of cowardly souis.\n\nBaser still it regardeth the obsequious, doggish one, who immediately lieth on his back, the submissive one; and there is also wisdom that is submissive, and doggish, and pious, and obsequious.\n\nHateful to it altogether, and a loathing, is he who will never defend himself, he who swalloweth down poisonous spittle and bad looks, the all-too-patient one, the all-endurer, the all-satisfied one: for that is the mode of slaves.\n\nWhether they be servile before gods and divine spurnings, or before men and stupid human opinions: at all kinds of slaves doth it spit, this blessed selfishness!\n\nBad: thus doth it call all that is spirit-broken, and sordidly-servile\u2014constrained, blinking eyes, depressed hearts, and the false submissive style, which kisseth with broad cowardly lips.\n\nAnd spurious wisdom: so doth it call all the wit that slaves, and hoary-headed and weary ones affect; and especially all the cunning, spurious-witted, curious-witted foolishness of priests!\n\nThe spurious wise, however, all the priests, the world-weary, and those whose souls are of feminine and servile nature\u2014oh, how hath their game all along abused selfishness!\n\nAnd precisely that was to be virtue and was to be called virtue\u2014to abuse selfishness! And \u201cselfless\u201d\u2014so did they wish themselves with good reason, all those world-weary cowards and cross-spiders!\n\nBut to all those cometh now the day, the change, the sword of judgment, the great noontide: then shall many things be revealed!\n\nAnd he who proclaimeth the ego wholesome and holy, and selfishness blessed, verily, he, the prognosticator, speaketh also what he knoweth: \u201cBehold, it cometh, it is night, the great noontide!\u201d\n\n\u00a0\n\nThus spake Zarathustra.\n\n\u00a0\n\n55. The Spirit of Gravity\n\n\u00a0\n\n1\n\nMy mouthpiece\u2014is of the people: too coarsely and cordially do I talk for Angora rabbits. And still stranger soundeth my word unto all ink-fish and pen-foxes.\n\nMy hand-\u2014is a fool\u2019s hand: woe unto all tables and walls, and whatever hath room for fool\u2019s sketching, fool\u2019s scrawling!\n\nMy foot\u2014is a horse-foot; therewith do I trample and trot over stick and stone, in the fields up and down, and am bedevilled with delight in all fast racing.\n\nMy stomach\u2014is surely an eagle\u2019s stomach? For it preferreth lamb\u2019s flesh. Certainly it is a bird\u2019s stomach.\n\nNourished with innocent things, and with few, ready and impatient to fly, to fly away\u2014that is now my nature: why should there not be something of bird-nature therein!\n\nAnd especially that I am hostile to the spirit of gravity, that is bird-nature:\u2014verily, deadly hostile, supremely hostile, originally hostile! Oh, whither hath my hostility not flown and misflown!\n\nThereof could I sing a song\u2014\u2014and will sing it: though I be alone in an empty house, and must sing it to mine own ears.\n\nOther singers are there, to be sure, to whom only the full house maketh the voice soft, the hand eloquent, the eye expressive, the heart wakeful:\u2014those do I not resemble.\u2014\n\n\u00a0\n\n2\n\nHe who one day teacheth men to fly will have shifted all landmarks; to him will all landmarks themselves fly into the air; the earth will he christen anew\u2014as \u201cthe light body.\u201d\n\nThe ostrich runneth faster than the fastest horse, but it also thrusteth its head heavily into the heavy earth: thus is it with the man who cannot yet fly.\n\nHeavy unto him are earth and life, and so willeth the spirit of gravity! But he who would become light, and be a bird, must love himself:\u2014thus do I teach.\n\nNot, to be sure, with the love of the sick and infected, for with them stinketh even self-love!\n\nOne must learn to love oneself\u2014thus do I teach\u2014with a wholesome and healthy love: that one may endure to be with oneself, and not go roving about.\n\nSuch roving about christeneth itself \u201cbrotherly love\u201d; with these words hath there hitherto been the best lying and dissembling, and especially by those who have been burdensome to every one.\n\nAnd verily, it is no commandment for today and tomorrow to learn to love oneself. Rather is it of all arts the finest, subtlest, last and patientest.\n\nFor to its possessor is all possession well concealed, and of all treasure-pits one\u2019s own is last excavated\u2014so causeth the spirit of gravity.\n\nAlmost in the cradle are we apportioned with heavy words and worths: \u201cgood\u201d and \u201cevil\u201d\u2014so calleth itself this dowry. For the sake of it we are forgiven for living.\n\nAnd therefore suffereth one little children to come unto one, to forbid them betimes to love themselves\u2014so causeth the spirit of gravity.\n\nAnd we\u2014we bear loyally what is apportioned unto us, on hard shoulders, over rugged mountains! And when we sweat, then do people say to us: \u201cYea, life is hard to bear!\u201d\n\nBut man himself only is hard to bear! The reason thereof is that he carrieth too many extraneous things on his shoulders. Like the camel kneeleth he down, and letteth himself be well laden.\n\nEspecially the strong load-bearing man in whom reverence resideth. Too many extraneous heavy words and worths loadeth he upon himself\u2014then seemeth life to him a desert!\n\nAnd verily! Many a thing also that is our own is hard to bear! And many internal things in man are like the oyster\u2014repulsive and slippery and hard to grasp;\u2014\n\nSo that an elegant shell, with elegant adornment, must plead for them. But this art also must one learn: to have a shell, and a fine appearance, and sagacious blindness!\n\nAgain, it deceiveth about many things in man, that many a shell is poor and pitiable, and too much of a shell. Much concealed goodness and power is never dreamt of; the choicest dainties find no tasters!\n\nWomen know that, the choicest of them: a little fatter a little leaner\u2014oh, how much fate is in so little!\n\nMan is difficult to discover, and unto himself most difficult of all; often lieth the spirit concerning the soul. So causeth the spirit of gravity.\n\nHe, however, hath discovered himself who saith: This is my good and evil: therewith hath he silenced the mole and the dwarf, who say: \u201cGood for all, evil for all.\u201d\n\nVerily, neither do I like those who call everything good, and this world the best of all. Those do I call the all-satisfied.\n\nAll-satisfiedness, which knoweth how to taste everything, \u2014that is not the best taste! I honour the refractory, fastidious tongues and stomachs, which have learned to say \u201cI\u201d and \u201cYea\u201d and \u201cNay.\u201d\n\nTo chew and digest everything, however\u2014that is the genuine swine-nature! Ever to say Ye-a\u2014that hath only the ass learned, and those like it!\u2014\"\n\nDeep yellow and hot red\u2014so wanteth my taste\u2014it mixeth blood with all colours. He, however, who whitewasheth his house, betrayeth unto me a whitewashed soul.\n\nWith mummies, some fall in love; others with phantoms: both alike hostile to all flesh and blood\u2014oh, how repugnant are both to my taste! For I love blood.\n\nAnd there will I not reside and abide where every one spitteth and speweth: that is now my taste,\u2014rather would I live amongst thieves and perjurers. Nobody carrieth gold in his mouth.\n\nStill more repugnant unto me, however, are all lick-spittles; and the most repugnant animal of man that I found, did I christen \u201cparasite\u201d: it would not love, and would yet live by love.\n\nUnhappy do I call all those who have only one choice: either to become evil beasts, or evil beast-tamers. Amongst such would I not build my tabernacle.\n\nUnhappy do I also call those who have ever to wait,\u2014they are repugnant to my taste\u2014all the toll-gatherers and traders, and kings, and other landkeepers and shopkeepers.\n\nVerily, I learned waiting also, and thoroughly so,\u2014but only waiting for myself. And above all did I learn standing and walking and running and leaping and climbing and dancing.\n\nThis however is my teaching: he who wisheth one day to fly, must first learn standing and walking and running and climbing and dancing:\u2014one doth not fly into flying!\n\nWith rope-ladders learned I to reach many a window, with nimble legs did I climb high masts: to sit on high masts of perception seemed to me no small bliss;\u2014\n\n\u2014To flicker like small flames on high masts: a small light, certainly, but a great comfort to cast-away sailors and shipwrecked ones!\n\nBy divers ways and wendings did I arrive at my truth; not by one ladder did I mount to the height where mine eye roveth into my remoteness.\n\nAnd unwillingly only did I ask my way\u2014\u2014that was always counter to my taste! Rather did I question and test the ways themselves.\n\nA testing and a questioning hath been all my travelling: \u2014and verily, one must also learn to answer such questioning! That, however,\u2014is my taste:\n\n\u2014Neither a good nor a bad taste, but my taste, of which I have no longer either shame or secrecy.\n\n\u201cThis\u2014is now my way,\u2014where is yours?\u201d Thus did I answer those who asked me \u201cthe way.\u201d For the way\u2014it doth not exist!\n\n\u00a0\n\nThus spake Zarathustra.\n\n\u00a0\n\n56. Old and New Tables\n\n\u00a0\n\n1\n\nHere do I sit and wait, old broken tables around me and also new half-written tables. When cometh mine hour?\n\n\u2014The hour of my descent, of my down-going: for once more will I go unto men.\n\nFor that hour do I now wait: for first must the signs come unto me that it is mine hour\u2014namely, the laughing lion with the flock of doves.\n\nMeanwhile do I talk to myself as one who hath time. No one telleth me anything new, so I tell myself mine own story.\n\n\u00a0\n\n2\n\nWhen I came unto men, then found I them resting on an old infatuation: all of them thought they had long known what was good and bad for men.\n\nAn old wearisome business seemed to them all discourse about virtue; and he who wished to sleep well spake of \u201cgood\u201d and \u201cbad\u201d ere retiring to rest.\n\nThis somnolence did I disturb when I taught that no one yet knoweth what is good and bad:\u2014unless it be the creating one!\n\n\u2014It is he, however, who createth man\u2019s goal, and giveth to the earth its meaning and its future: he only effecteth it that aught is good or bad.\n\nAnd I bade them upset their old academic chairs, and wherever that old infatuation had sat; I bade them laugh at their great moralists, their saints, their poets, and their saviours.\n\nAt their gloomy sages did I bid them laugh, and whoever had sat admonishing as a black scarecrow on the tree of life.\n\nOn their great grave-highway did I seat myself, and even beside the carrion and vultures\u2014and I laughed at all their bygone and its mellow decaying glory.\n\nVerily, like penitential preachers and fools did I cry wrath and shame on all their greatness and smallness. Oh, that their best is so very small! Oh, that their worst is so very small! Thus did I laugh.\n\nThus did my wise longing, born in the mountains, cry and laugh in me; a wild wisdom, verily!\u2014my great pinion-rustling longing.\n\nAnd oft did it carry me off and up and away and in the midst of laughter; then flew I quivering like an arrow with sun-intoxicated rapture:\n\n\u2014Out into distant futures, which no dream hath yet seen, into warmer souths than ever sculptor conceived,\u2014where gods in their dancing are ashamed of all clothes:\n\n(That I may speak in parables and halt and stammer like the poets: and verily I am ashamed that I have still to be a poet!)\n\nWhere all becoming seemed to me dancing of gods, and wantoning of gods, and the world unloosed and unbridled and fleeing back to itself:\u2014\n\n\u2014As an eternal self-fleeing and re-seeking of one another of many gods, as the blessed self-contradicting, recommuning, and refraternising with one another of many gods:\u2014\n\nWhere all time seemed to me a blessed mockery of moments, where necessity was freedom itself, which played happily with the goad of freedom:\u2014\n\nWhere I also found again mine old devil and arch-enemy, the spirit of gravity, and all that it created: constraint, law, necessity and consequence and purpose and will and good and evil:\u2014\n\nFor must there not be that which is danced over, danced beyond? Must there not, for the sake of the nimble, the nimblest,\u2014be moles and clumsy dwarfs?\u2014\n\n\u00a0\n\n3\n\nThere was it also where I picked up from the path the word \u201cSuperman,\u201d and that man is something that must be surpassed.\n\n\u2014That man is a bridge and not a goal\u2014rejoicing over his noontides and evenings, as advances to new rosy dawns:\n\n\u2014The Zarathustra word of the great noontide, and whatever else I have hung up over men like purple evening-afterglows.\n\nVerily, also new stars did I make them see, along with new nights; and over cloud and day and night, did I spread out laughter like a gay-coloured canopy.\n\nI taught them all my poetisation and aspiration: to compose and collect into unity what is fragment in man, and riddle and fearful chance;\u2014\n\n\u2014As composer, riddle-reader, and redeemer of chance, did I teach them to create the future, and all that hath been\u2014to redeem by creating.\n\nThe past of man to redeem, and every \u201cIt was\u201d to transform, until the Will saith: \u201cBut so did I will it! So shall I will it\u2014\u201d\n\n\u2014This did I call redemption; this alone taught I them to call redemption.\u2014\u2014\n\nNow do I await my redemption\u2014that I may go unto them for the last time.\n\nFor once more will I go unto men: amongst them will my sun set; in dying will I give them my choicest gift!\n\nFrom the sun did I learn this, when it goeth down, the exuberant one: gold doth it then pour into the sea, out of inexhaustible riches,\u2014\n\n\u2014So that the poorest fisherman roweth even with golden oars! For this did I once see, and did not tire of weeping in beholding it\u2014\u2014\n\nLike the sun will also Zarathustra go down: now sitteth he here and waiteth, old broken tables around him, and also new tables\u2014half-written.\n\n\u00a0\n\n4\n\nBehold, here is a new table; but where are my brethren who will carry it with me to the valley and into hearts of flesh?\u2014\n\nThus demandeth my great love to the remotest ones: be not considerate of thy neighbour! Man is something that must be surpassed.\n\nThere are many divers ways and modes of surpassing: see thou thereto! But only a buffoon thinketh: \u201cman can also be overleapt.\u201d\n\nSurpass thyself even in thy neighbour: and a right which thou canst seize upon, shalt thou not allow to be given thee!\n\nWhat thou doest can no one do to thee again. Lo, there is no requital.\n\nHe who cannot command himself shall obey. And many a one can command himself, but still sorely lacketh self-obedience!\n\n\u00a0\n\n5\n\nThus wisheth the type of noble souls: they desire to have nothing gratuitously, least of all, life.\n\nHe who is of the populace wisheth to live gratuitously; we others, however, to whom life hath given itself\u2014we are ever considering what we can best give in return!\n\nAnd verily, it is a noble dictum which saith: \u201cWhat life promiseth us, that promise will we keep\u2014to life!\u201d\n\nOne should not wish to enjoy where one doth not contribute to the enjoyment. And one should not wish to enjoy!\n\nFor enjoyment and innocence are the most bashful things. Neither like to be sought for. One should have them,\u2014but one should rather seek for guilt and pain!\u2014\n\n\u00a0\n\n6\n\nO my brethren, he who is a firstling is ever sacrificed. Now, however, are we firstlings!\n\nWe all bleed on secret sacrificial altars, we all burn and broil in honour of ancient idols.\n\nOur best is still young: this exciteth old palates. Our flesh is tender, our skin is only lambs\u2019 skin:\u2014how could we not excite old idol-priests!\n\nIn ourselves dwelleth he still, the old idol-priest, whe broileth our best for his banquet. Ah, my brethren, how could firstlings fail to be sacrifices!\n\nBut so wisheth our type; and I love those who do not wish to preserve themselves, the down-going ones do I love with mine entire love: for they go beyond.\u2014\n\n\u00a0\n\n7\n\nTo be true\u2014that can few be! And he who can, will not! Least of all, however, can the good be true.\n\nOh, those good ones! Good men never speak the truth. For the spirit, thus to be good, is a malady.\n\nThey yield, those good ones, they submit themselves; their heart repeateth, their soul obeyeth: he, however, who obeyeth, doth not listen to himself!\n\nAll that is called evil by the good, must come together in order that one truth may be born. O my brethren, are ye also evil enough for this truth?\n\nThe daring venture, the prolonged distrust, the cruel Nay, the tedium, the cutting-into-the-quick\u2014how seldom do these come together! Out of such seed, however\u2014is truth produced!\n\nBeside the bad conscience hath hitherto grown all knowledge! Break up, break up, ye discerning ones, the old tables!\n\n\u00a0\n\n8\n\nWhen the water hath planks, when gangways and railings o\u2019erspan the stream, verily, he is not believed who then saith: \u201cAll is in flux.\u201d\n\nBut even the simpletons contradict him. \u201cWhat?\u201d say the simpletons, \u201call in flux? Planks and railings are still over the stream!\n\n\u201cOver the stream all is stable, all the values of things, the bridges and bearings, all \u2018good\u2019 and \u2018evil\u2019: these are all stable!\u201d\u2014\n\nCometh, however, the hard winter, the stream-tamer, then learn even the wittiest distrust, and verily, not only the simpletons then say: \u201cShould not everything\u2014stand still?\u201d\n\n\u201cFundamentally standeth everything still\u201d\u2014that is an appropriate winter doctrine, good cheer for an unproductive period, a great comfort for winter-sleepers and fireside-loungers.\n\n\u201cFundamentally standeth everything still\u201d\u2014: but contrary thereto, preacheth the thawing wind!\n\nThe thawing wind, a bullock, which is no ploughing bullock\u2014a furious bullock, a destroyer, which with angry horns breaketh the ice! The ice however\u2014\u2014breaketh gangways!\n\nO my brethren, is not everything at present in flux? Have not all railings and gangways fallen into the water? Who would still hold on to \u201cgood\u201d and \u201cevil\u201d?\n\n\u201cWoe to us! Hail to us! The thawing wind bloweth!\u201d\u2014 Thus preach, my brethren, through all the streets!\n\n\u00a0\n\n9\n\nThere is an old illusion\u2014it is called good and evil. Around soothsayers and astrologers hath hitherto revolved the orbit of this illusion.\n\nOnce did one believe in soothsayers and astrologers; and therefore did one believe, \u201cEverything is fate: thou shalt, for thou must!\u201d\n\nThen again did one distrust all soothsayers and astrologers; and therefore did one believe, \u201cEverything is freedom: thou canst, for thou willest!\u201d\n\nO my brethren, concerning the stars and the future there hath hitherto been only illusion, and not knowledge; and therefore concerning good and evil there hath hitherto been only illusion and not knowledge!\n\n\u00a0\n\n10\n\n\u201cThou shalt not rob! Thou shalt not slay!\u201d\u2014such precepts were once called holy; before them did one bow the knee and the head, and take off one\u2019s shoes.\n\nBut I ask you: Where have there ever been better robbers and slayers in the world than such holy precepts?\n\nIs there not even in all life\u2014robbing and slaying? And for such precepts to be called holy, was not truth itself thereby\u2014slain?\n\n\u2014\u2014Or was it a sermon of death that called holy what contradicted and dissuaded from life?\u2014O my brethren, break up, break up for me the old tables!\n\n\u00a0\n\n11\n\nIt is my sympathy with all the past that I see it is abandoned,\u2014\n\n\u2014Abandoned to the favour, the spirit and the madness of every generation that cometh, and reinterpreteth all that hath been as its bridge!\n\nA great potentate might arise, an artful prodigy, who with approval and disapproval could strain and constrain all the past, until it became for him a bridge, a harbinger, a herald, and a cock-crowing.\n\nThis however is the other danger, and mine other sympathy:\u2014he who is of the populace, his thoughts go back to his grandfather,\u2014with his grandfather, however, doth time cease.\n\nThus is all the past abandoned: for it might some day happen for the populace to become master, and drown all time in shallow waters.\n\nTherefore, O my brethren, a new nobility is needed, which shall be the adversary of all populace and potentate rule, and shall inscribe anew the word \u201cnoble\u201d on new tables.\n\nFor many noble ones are needed, and many kinds of noble ones, for a new nobility! Or, as I once said in parable: \u201cThat is just divinity, that there are gods, but no God!\u201d\n\n\u00a0\n\n12\n\nO my brethren, I consecrate you and point you to a new nobility: ye shall become procreators and cultivators and sowers of the future;\u2014\n\n\u2014Verily, not to a nobility which ye could purchase like traders with traders\u2019 gold; for little worth is all that hath its price.\n\nLet it not be your honour henceforth whence ye come, but whither ye go! Your Will and your feet which seek to surpass you\u2014let these be your new honour!\n\nVerily, not that ye have served a prince\u2014of what account are princes now!\u2014nor that ye have become a bulwark to that which standeth, that it may stand more firmly.\n\nNot that your family have become courtly at courts, and that ye have learned\u2014gay-coloured, like the flamingo\u2014to stand long hours in shallow pools:\n\n(For ability-to-stand is a merit in courtiers; and all courtiers believe that unto blessedness after death pertaineth\u2014permission-to-sit!)\n\nNor even that a Spirit called Holy, led your forefathers into promised lands, which I do not praise: for where the worst of all trees grew\u2014the cross,\u2014in that land there is nothing to praise!\u2014\n\n\u2014And verily, wherever this \u201cHoly Spirit\u2019\u2019 led its knights, always in such campaigns did\u2014goats and geese, and wry-heads and guy-heads run foremost!\u2014\n\nO my brethren, not backward shall your nobility gaze, but outward! Exiles shall ye be from all fatherlands and forefatherlands!\n\nYour children\u2019s land shall ye love: let this love be your new nobility,\u2014the undiscovered in the remotest seas! For it do I bid your sails search and search!\n\nUnto your children shall ye make amends for being the children of your fathers: all the past shall ye thus redeem! This new table do I place over you!\n\n\u00a0\n\n13\n\n\u201cWhy should one live? All is vain! To live\u2014that is to thresh straw; to live\u2014that is to burn oneself and yet not get warm.\u201d\u2014\n\nSuch ancient babbling still passeth for \u201cwisdom\u201d, because it is old, however, and smelleth mustily, therefore is it the more honoured. Even mould ennobleth.\u2014\n\nChildren might thus speak: they shun the fire because it hath burnt them! There is much childishness in the old books of wisdom.\n\nAnd he who ever \u201cthresheth straw,\u201d why should he be allowed to rail at threshing! Such a fool one would have to muzzle!\n\nSuch persons sit down to the table and bring nothing with them, not even good hunger:\u2014and then do they rail: \u201cAll is vain!\u201d\n\nBut to eat and drink well, my brethren, is verily no vain art! Break up, break up for me the tables of the never-joyous ones!\n\n\u00a0\n\n14\n\n\u201cTo the clean are all things clean\u201d\u2014thus say the people. I, however, say unto you: To the swine all things become swinish\n\nTherefore preach the visionaries and bowed-heads (whos: hearts are also bowed down): \u201cThe world itself is a filthy monster.\u201d\n\nFor these are all unclean spirits; especially those, however, who have no peace or rest, unless they see the world from the backside\u2014the backworldsmen!\n\nTo those do I say it to the face, although it sound unpleasantly: the world resembleth man, in that it hath a backside,\u2014so much is true!\n\nThere is in the world much filth: so much is true! But the world itself is not therefore a filthy monster!\n\nThere is wisdom in the fact that much in the world smelleth badly: loathing itself createth wings, and fountain-divining powers!\n\nIn the best there is still something to loathe; and the best is still something that must be surpassed!\u2014\n\nO my brethren, there is much wisdom in the fact that much filth is in the world!\u2014\n\n\u00a0\n\n15\n\nSuch sayings did I hear pious backworldsmen speak to their consciences, and verily without wickedness or guile,\u2014although there is nothing more guileful in the world, or more wicked.\n\n\u201cLet the world be as it is! Raise not a finger against it!\u201d\n\n\u201cLet whoever will choke and stab and skin and scrape the people: raise not a finger against it! Thereby will they learn to renounce the world.\u201d\n\n\u201cAnd thine own reason\u2014this shalt thou thyself stifle and choke; for it is a reason of this world,\u2014thereby wilt thou learn thyself to renounce the world.\u201d\u2014\n\n\u2014Shatter, shatter, O my brethren, those old tables of the pious! Tatter the maxims of the world-maligners!\u2014\n\n\u00a0\n\n16\n\n\u201cHe who learneth much unlearneth all violent cravings\u201d\u2014that do people now whisper to one another in all the dark lanes.\n\n\u201cWisdom wearieth, nothing is worth while; thou shalt not crave!\u201d\u2014this new table found I hanging even in the public markets.\n\nBreak up for me, O my brethren, break up also that new table! The weary-o\u2019-the-world put it up, and the preachers of death and the jailer: for lo, it is also a sermon for slavery:\u2014\n\nBecause they learned badly and not the best, and everything too early and everything too fast; because they ate badly: from thence hath resulted their ruined stomach;\u2014\n\n\u2014For a ruined stomach, is their spirit: it persuadeth to death! For verily, my brethren, the spirit is a stomach!\n\nLife is a well of delight, but to him in whom the ruined stomach speaketh, the father of affliction, all fountains are poisoned.\n\nTo discern: that is delight to the lion-willed! But he who hath become weary, is himself merely \u201cwilled\u201d; with him play all the waves.\n\nAnd such is always the nature of weak men: they lose themselves on their way. And at last asketh their weariness: \u201cWhy did we ever go on the way? All is indifferent!\u201d\n\nTo them soundeth it pleasant to have preached in their ears: \u201cNothing is worth while! Ye shall not will!\u201d That, however, is a sermon for slavery.\n\nO my brethren, a fresh blustering wind cometh Zarathustra unto all way-weary ones; many noses will he yet make sneeze!\n\nEven through walls bloweth my free breath, and into prisons and imprisoned spirits!\n\nWilling emancipateth: for willing is creating: so do I teach. And only for creating shall ye learn!\n\nAnd also the learning shall ye learn only from me, the learning well!\u2014He who hath ears let him hear!\n\n\u00a0\n\n17\n\nThere standeth the boat\u2014thither goeth it over, perhaps into vast nothingness\u2014but who willeth to enter into this \u201cPerhaps\u201d?\n\nNone of you want to enter into the death-boat! How should ye then be world-weary ones!\n\nWorld-weary ones! And have not even withdrawn from the earth! Eager did I ever find you for the earth, amorous still of your own earth-weariness!\n\nNot in vain doth your lip hang down:\u2014a small worldly wish still sitteth thereon! And in your eye\u2014floateth there not a cloudlet of unforgotten earthly bliss?\n\nThere are on the earth many good inventions, some useful, some pleasant: for their sake is the earth to be loved.\n\nAnd many such good inventions are there, that they are like woman's breasts: useful at the same time, and pleasant.\n\nYe world-weary ones, however! Ye earth-idlers! You, shall one beat with stripes! With stripes shall one again make you sprightly limbs.\n\nFor if ye be not invalids, or decrepit creatures, of whom the earth is weary, then are ye sly sloths, or dainty, sneaking pleasure-cats. And if ye will not again run gaily, then shall ye\u2014pass away!\n\nTo the incurable shall one not seek to be a physician: thus teacheth Zarathustra:\u2014so shall ye pass away!\n\nBut more courage is needed to make an end than to make a new verse: that do all physicians and poets know well.\u2014\n\n\u00a0\n\n18\n\nO my brethren, there are tables which weariness framed, and tables which slothfulness framed, corrupt slothfulness: although they speak similarly, they want to be heard differently.\u2014\n\nSee this languishing one! Only a span-breadth is he from his goal; but from weariness hath he lain down obstinately in the dust, this brave one!\n\nFrom weariness yawneth he at the path, at the earth, at the goal, and at himself: not a step further will he go,\u2014this brave one!\n\nNow gloweth the sun upon him, and the dogs lick at his sweat: but he lieth there in his obstinacy and preferreth to languish:\u2014\n\n\u2014A span-breadth from his goal, to languish! Verily, ye will have to drag him into his heaven by the hair of his head\u2014this hero!\n\nBetter still that ye let him lie where he hath lain down, that sleep may come unto him, the comforter, with cooling patter-rain.\n\nLet him lie, until of his own accord he awakeneth,\u2014until of his own accord he repudiateth all weariness, and what weariness hath taught through him!\n\nOnly, my brethren, see that ye scare the dogs awav from him, the idle skulkers, and all the swarming vermin:\u2014\n\n\u2014All the swarming vermin of the \u201ccultured,\u201d that\u2014feast on the sweat of every hero!\u2014\n\n\u00a0\n\n19\n\nI form circles around me and holy boundaries; ever fewer ascend with me ever higher mountains: I build a mouatain-range out of ever holier mountains.\u2014\n\nBut wherever ye would ascend with me, O my brethren, take care lest a parasite ascend with you!\n\nA parasite: that is a reptile, a creeping, cringing reptile, that trieth to fatten on your infirm and sore places.\n\nAnd this is its art: it divineth where ascending souls are weary, in your trouble and dejection, in your sensitive modesty, doth it build its loathsome nest.\n\nWhere the strong are weak, where the noble are all-too-gentle\u2014there buildeth it its loathsome nest; the parasite liveth wnere the great have small sore-places.\n\nWhat is the highest of all species of being, and what is the lowest? The parasite is the lowest species; he, however, who is of the highest species feedeth most parasites.\n\nFor the soul which hath the longest ladder, and can go deepest down: how could there fail to be most parasites upon it?\u2014\n\n\u2014The most comprehensive soul, which can run and stray and rove furthest in itself; the most necessary soul, which out of joy flingeth itself into chance:\u2014\n\n\u2014The soul in Being, which plungeth into Becoming; the possessing soul, which seeketh to attain desire and longing:\u2014\n\n\u2014The soul fleeing from itself, which overtaketh itself in the widest circuit; the wisest soul, unto which folly speaketh most sweetly:\u2014\n\n\u2014The soul most self-loving, in which all things have their current and counter-current, their ebb and their flow:\u2014oh, how could the loftiest soul fail to have the worst parasites?\n\n\u00a0\n\n20\n\nO my brethren, am I then cruel? But I say: What falleth, that shall one also push!\n\nEverything of today\u2014~it falleth, it decayeth; who would preserve it! But I\u2014I wish also to push it!\n\nKnow ye the delight which rolleth stones into precipitous depths?\u2014Those men of today, see just how they roll into my depths!\n\nA prelude am I to better players, O my brethren! An example! Do according to mine example!\n\nAnd him whom ye do not teach to fly, teach I pray you\u2014to fall faster!\u2014\n\n\u00a0\n\n21\n\nI love the brave: but it is not enough to be a swordsman,\u2014one must also know whereon to use swordsmanship!\n\nAnd often is it greater bravery to keep quiet and pass by, that thereby one may reserve oneself for a worthier foe!\n\nYe shall only have foes to be hated; but not foes to be despised: ye must be proud of your foes. Thus have I already taught.\n\nFor the worthier foe, O my brethren, shall ye reserve yourselves: therefore must ye pass by many a one,\u2014\n\n\u2014Especially many of the rabble, who din your ears with noise about people and peoples.\n\nKeep your eye clear of their For and Against! There is there much right, much wrong: he who looketh on becometh wroth.\n\nTherein viewing, therein hewing\u2014they are the same thing: therefore depart into the forests and lay your sword to sleep!\n\nGo your ways! and let the people and peoples go theirs!\u2014gloomy ways, verily, on which not a single hope glinteth any more!\n\nLet there the trader rule, where all that still glittereth is\u2014traders\u2019 gold. It is the time of kings no longer: that which now calleth itself the people is unworthy of kings.\n\nSee how these peoples themselves now do just like the traders: they pick up the smallest advantage out of all kinds of rubbish!\n\nThey lay lures for one another, they lure things out of one another,\u2014that they call \u201cgood neighbourliness.\u201d O blessed remote period when a people said to itself: \u201cI will be\u2014master over peoples!\u201d\n\nFor, my brethren, the best shall rule, the best also willeth to rule! And where the teaching is different, there\u2014the best is lacking.\n\n\u00a0\n\n22\n\nIf they had\u2014bread for nothing, alas! for what would they cry! Their maintainment\u2014that is their true entertainment; and they shall have it hard!\n\nBeasts of prey, are they: in their \u201cworking\u201d\u2014there is even plundering, in their \u201cearning\u201d\u2014there is even over-reaching! Therefore shall they have it hard!\n\nBetter beasts of prey shall they thus become, subtler, cleverer, more man-like: for man is the best beast of prey.\n\nAll the animals hath man already robbed of their virtues: that is why of all animals it hath been hardest for man.\n\nOnly the birds are still beyond him. And if man should yet learn to fly, alas! to what height\u2014would his rapacity fly!\n\n\u00a0\n\n23\n\nThus would I have man and woman: fit for war, the one; fit for maternity, the other; both, however, fit for dancing with head and legs.\n\nAnd lost be the day to us in which a measure hath not been danced. And false be every truth which hath not had laughter along with it!\n\n\u00a0\n\n24\n\nYour marriage-arranging: see that it be not a bad arranging! Ye have arranged too hastily: so there followeth therefrom\u2014marriage-breaking!\n\nAnd better marriage-breaking than marriage-bending, marriage-lying!\u2014Thus spake a woman unto me: \u201cIndeed, I broke the marriage, but first did the marriage break\u2014me!\u201d\n\nThe badly paired found I ever the most revengeful: they make every one suffer for it that they no longer run singly.\n\nOn that account want I the honest ones to say to one another: \u201cWe love each other: let us see to it that we maintain our love! Or shall our pledging be blundering?\u201d\n\n\u2014\"Give us a set term and a small marriage, that we may see if we are fit for the great marriage! It is a great matter always to be twain.\u201d\n\nThus do I counsel all honest ones; and what would be my love to the Superman, and to all that is to come, if I should counsel and speak otherwise!\n\nNot only to propagate yourselves onwards but upwards\u2014thereto, O my brethren, may the garden of marriage heip you!\n\n\u00a0\n\n25\n\nHe who hath grown wise concerning old origins, lo, he will at last seek after the fountains of the future and new origins.\u2014\n\nO my brethren, not long will it be until new peoples shall arise and new fountains shall rush down into new depths.\n\nFor the earthquake\u2014it choketh up many wells, it causeth much languishing: but it bringeth also to light inner powers and secrets.\n\nThe earthquake discloseth new fountains. In the earthquake of old peoples new fountains burst forth.\n\nAnd whoever calleth out: \u201cLo, here is a well for many thirsty ones, one heart for many longing ones, one will for many instruments\u201d:\u2014around him collecteth a people, that is to say, many attempting ones.\n\nWho can command, who must obey\u2014that is there attempted! Ah, with what long seeking and solving and failing and learning and re-attempting!\n\nHuman society: it is an attempt\u2014so I teach\u2014a long seeking: it seeketh however the ruler!\u2014\n\n\u2014An attempt, my brethren! And no \u201dcontract\u201d! Destroy, I pray you, destroy that word of the soft-hearted and half-and-half!\n\n\u00a0\n\n26\n\nO my brethren! With whom lieth the greatest danger to the whole human future? Is it not with the good and just?\u2014\n\n\u2014As those who say and feel in their hearts: \u201cWe already know what is good and just, we possess it also; woe to those who still seek thereafter!\u201d\n\nAnd whatever harm the wicked may do, the harm of the good is the harmfulest harm!\n\nAnd whatever harm the world-maligners may do, the harm of the good is the harmfulest harm!\n\nO my brethren, into the hearts of the good and just looked some one once on a time, who said: \u201cThey are the Pharisees.\u201d But people did not understand him.\n\nThe good and just themselves were not free to understand him; their spirit was imprisoned in their good conscience. The stupidity of the good is unfathomably wise.\n\nIt is the truth, however, that the good must be Pharisees\u2014they have no choice!\n\nThe good must crucity him who deviseth his own virtue! That is the truth!\n\nThe second one, however, who discovered their country\u2014the country, heart and soil of the good and just,\u2014it was he who asked: \u201cWhom do they hate most?\u201d\n\nThe creator, hate they most, him who breaketh the tables and old values, the breaker,\u2014him they call the law-breaker.\n\nFor the good\u2014they cannot create; they are always the beginning of the end:\u2014\n\n\u2014They crucify him who writeth new values on new tables, they sacrifice unto themselves the future\u2014they crucify the whole human future!\n\nThe good\u2014they have always been the beginning of the end.\u2014\n\n\u00a0\n\n27\n\nO my brethren, have ye also understood this word? And what I once said of the \u201clast man\u201d?\u2014\u2014\n\nWith whom lieth the greatest danger to the whole human future? Is it not with the good and just?\n\nBreak up, break up, I pray you, the good and just!\u2014O my brethren, have ye understood also this word?\n\n\u00a0\n\n28\n\nYe flee from me? Ye are frightened? Ye tremble at this word?\n\nO my brethren, when I enjoined you to break up the good, and the tables of the good, then only did I embark man on his high seas.\n\nAnd now only cometh unto him the great terror, the great outlook, the great sickness, the great nausea, the great seasickness.\n\nFalse shores and false securities did the good teach you; in the lies of the good were ye born and bred. Everything hath been radically contorted and distorted by the good.\n\nBut he who discovered the country of \u201cman,\u201d discovered also the country of \u201cman\u2019s future.\u201d Now shall ye be sailors for me, brave, patient!\n\nKeep yourselves up betimes, my brethren, learn to keep yourselves up! The sea stormeth: many seek to raise themselves again by you.\n\nThe sea stormeth: all is in the sea. Well! Cheer up! Ye old seaman-hearts!\n\nWhat of fatherland! Thither striveth our helm where our children\u2019s land is! Thitherwards, stormier than the sea, stormeth our great longing! \u2014\n\n\u00a0\n\n29\n\n\u201cWhy so hard!\u201d\u2014said to the diamond one day the charcoal; \u201care we then not near relatives?\u201d\u2014\n\nWhy so soft? O my brethren; thus do I ask you: are ye then not\u2014my brethren?\n\nWhy so soft, so submissive and yielding? Why is there so much negation and abnegation in your hearts? Why is there so little fate in your looks?\n\nAnd if ye will not be fates and inexorable ones, how can ye one day\u2014conquer with me?\n\nAnd if your hardness will not glance and cut and chip to pieces, how can ye one day\u2014create with me?\n\nFor the creators are hard. And blessedness must it seem to you to press your hand upon millenniums as upon wax,\u2014\n\n\u2014Blessedness to write upon the will of millenniums as upon brass,\u2014harder than brass, nobler than brass. Entirely hard is only the noblest.\n\nThis new table, O my brethren, put I up over you: Become hard!\u2014\n\n\u00a0\n\n30\n\nO thou, my Will! Thou change of every need, my needfulness! Preserve me from all small victories!\n\nThou fatedness of my soul, which I call fate! Thou In-me! Over-me! Preserve and spare me for one great fate!\n\nAnd thy last greatness, my Will, spare it for thy last\u2014that thou mayest be inexorable in thy victory! Ah, who hath not succumbed to his victory!\n\nAh, whose eye hath not bedimmed in this intoxicated twilight! Ah, whose foot hath not faltered and forgotten in victory\u2014how to stand!\u2014\n\n\u2014That I may one day be ready and ripe in the great noontide: ready and ripe like the glowing ore, the lightning-bearing cloud, and the swelling milk-udder:\u2014\n\n\u2014Ready for myself and for my most hidden Will: a bow eager for its arrow, an arrow eager for its star:\u2014\n\n\u2014A star, ready and ripe in its noontide, glowing, pierced, blessed, by annihilating sun-arrows:\u2014\n\n\u2014A sun itself, and an inexorable sun-will, ready for annihilation in victory!\n\nO Will, thou change of every need, my needfulness! Spare me for one great victory!\u2014\u2014\n\n\u00a0\n\nThus spake Zarathustra.\n\n\u00a0\n\n57. The Convalescent\n\n\u00a0\n\n1\n\nOne morning, not long after his return to his cave, Zarathustra sprang up from his couch like a madman, crying with a frightful voice, and acting as if some one still lay on the couch who did not wish to rise. Zarathustra\u2019s voice also resounded in such a manner that his animals came to him frightened, and out of all the neighbouring caves and lurking-places all the creatures slipped away\u2014flying, fluttering, creeping or leaping, according to their variety of foot or wing. Zarathustra, however, spake these words:\n\n\u00a0\n\nUp, abysmal thought out of my depth! I am thy cock and morning dawn, thou overslept reptile: Up! Up! My voice shall soon crow thee awake!\n\nUnbind the fetters of thine ears: listen! For I wish to hear thee! Up! Up! There is thunder enough to make the very graves listen!\n\nAnd rub the sleep and all the dimness and blindness out of thine eyes! Hear me also with thine eyes: my voice is a medicine even for those born blind.\n\nAnd once thou art awake, then shalt thou ever remain awake. It is not my custom to awake great-grandmothers out of their sleep that I may bid them\u2014sleep on!\n\nThou stirrest, stretchest thyself, wheezest? Up! Up! Not wheeze, shalt thou,\u2014but speak unto me! Zarathustra calleth thee, Zarathustra the godless!\n\nI, Zarathustra, the advocate of living, the advocate of suffering, the advocate of the circuit\u2014thee do I call, my most abysmal thought!\n\nJoy to me! Thou comest,\u2014I hear thee! Mine abyss speaketh, my lowest depth have I turned over into the light!\n\nJoy to me! Come hither! Give me thy hand\u2014\u2014ha! let be! aha!\u2014\u2014Disgust, disgust, disgust\u2014\u2014\u2014alas to me!\n\n\u00a0\n\n2\n\nHardly, however, had Zarathustra spoken these words, when he fell down as one dead, and remained long as one dead. When however he again came to himself, then was he pale and trembling, and remained lying; and for long he would neither eat nor drink. This condition continued for seven days; his animals, however, did not leave him day nor night, except that the eagle flew forth to fetch food. And what it fetched and foraged, it laid on Zarathustra\u2019s couch: so that Zarathustra at last lay among yellow and red berries, grapes, rosy apples, sweet-smelling herbage, and pine-cones. At his feet, however, two lambs were stretched, which the eagle had with difficulty carried off from their shepherds.\n\nAt last, after seven days, Zarathustra raised himself upon his couch, took a rosy apple in his hand, smelt it and found its smell pleasant. Then did his animals think the time had come to speak unto him.\n\n\u00a0\n\n\u201cO Zarathustra,\u201d said they, \u201cnow hast thou lain thus for seven days with heavy eyes: wilt thou not set thyself again upon thy feet?\n\nStep out of thy cave: the world waiteth for thee as a garden. The wind playeth with heavy fragrance which seeketh for thee; and all brooks would like to run after thee.\n\nAll things long for thee, since thou hast remained alone for seven days\u2014step forth out of thy cave! All things want to be thy physicians!\n\nDid perhaps a new knowledge come to thee, a bitter, grievous knowledge? Like leavened dough layest thou, thy soul arose and swelled beyond all its bounds.\u2014\u201d\n\n\u2014O mine animals, answered Zarathustra, talk on thus and let me listen! It refresheth me so to hear your talk: where there is talk, there is the world as a garden unto me.\n\nHow charming it is that there are words and tones; are not words and tones rainbows and seeming bridges \u2019twixt the eternally separated?\n\nTo each soul belongeth another world; to each soul is every other soul a back-world.\n\nAmong the most alike doth semblance deceive most delightfully: for the smallest gap is most difficult to bridge over.\n\nFor me\u2014how could there be an outside-of-me? There is no outside! But this we forget on hearing tones; how delightfui it is that we forget!\n\nHave not names and tones been given unto things that man may refresh himself with them? It is a beautiful folly, speaking; therewith danceth man over everything.\n\nHow lovely is all speech and all falsehoods of tones! With tones danceth our love on variegated rainbows.\u2014\n\n\u2014\u201cO Zarathustra,\u201d said then his animals, \u201cto those who think like us, things all dance themselves: they come and hold out the hand and laugh and flee\u2014and return.\n\nEverything goeth, everything returneth; eternally rolleth the wheel of existence. Everything dieth, everything blossometh forth again; eternally runneth on the year of existence.\n\nEverything breaketh, everything is integrated anew; eternally buildeth itself the same house of existence. All things separate, all things again greet one another; eternally true to itself remaineth the ring of existence.\n\nEvery moment beginneth existence, around every \u2018Here\u2019 rolleth the ball \u2018There.\u2019 The middle is everywhere. Crooked is the path of eternity.\u201d\u2014\n\n\u2014O ye wags and barrel-organs! answered Zarathustra, and smiled once more, how well do ye know what had to be fulfilled in seven days:\u2014\n\n\u2014And how that monster crept into my throat and choked me! But I bit off its head and spat it away from me.\n\nAnd ye\u2014ye have made a lyre-lay out of it? Now, however, do I lie here, still exhausted with that biting and spitting-away, still sick with mine own salvation.\n\nAnd ye looked on at it all? O mine animals, are ye also cruel? Did ye like to look at my great pain as men do? For man is the cruellest animal.\n\nAt tragedies, bull-fights, and crucifixions hath he hitherto been happiest on earth; and when he invented his hell, behold, that was his heaven on earth.\n\nWhen the great man crieth\u2014: immediately runneth the little man thither, and his tongue hangeth out of his mouth for very lusting. He, however, calleth it his \u201cpity.\u201d\n\nThe little man, especially the poet\u2014how passionately doth he accuse life in words! Hearken to him, but do not fail to hear the delight which is in all accusation!\n\nSuch accusers of life\u2014them life overcometh with a glance of the eye. \u201cThou lovest me?\u201d saith the insolent one; \u201cwait a little, as yet have I no time for thee.\u201d\n\nTowards himself man is the cruellest animal; and in all who call themselves \u201csinners\u201d and \u201cbearers of the cross\u201d and \u201cpenitents,\u201d do not overlook the voluptuousness in their plaints and accusations!\n\nAnd I myself\u2014do, I thereby want to be man\u2019s accuser? Ah, mine animals, this only have I learned hitherto, that for man his baddest is necessary for his best,\u2014\n\n\u2014That all that is baddest is the best power, and the hardest stone for the highest creator; and that man must become better and badder:\u2014\n\nNot to this torture-stake was I tied, that I know man is bad,\u2014but I cried, as no one hath yet cried:\n\n\u201cAh, that his baddest is so very small! Ah, that his best is so very small!\u201d\n\nThe great disgust at man\u2014it strangled me and had crept into my throat: and what the soothsayer had presaged: \u201cAll is alike, nothing is worth while, knowledge strangleth.\u201d\n\nA long twilight limped on before me, a fatally weary, fatally intoxicated sadness, which spake with yawning mouth.\n\n\u201cEternally he returneth, the man of whom thou art weary, the small man\u201d\u2014so yawned my sadness, and dragged its foot and could not go to sleep.\n\nA cavern, became the human earth to me; its breast caved in; everything living became to me human dust and bones and mouldering past.\n\nMy sighing sat on all human graves, and could no longer arise: my sighing and questioning croaked and choked, and gnawed and nagged day and night:\n\n\u2014\"Ah, man returneth eternally! The small man returneth eternally!\u201d\n\nNaked had I once seen both of them, the greatest man and the smallest man: all too like one another\u2014all too human even the greatest man!\n\nAll too small, even the greatest man!\u2014that was my disgust at man! And the eternal return also of the smallest man!\u2014that was my disgust at all existence!\n\nAh, Disgust! Disgust! Disgust!\u2014\u2014Thus spake Zarathustra, and sighed and shuddered; for he remembered his sickness. Then did his animals prevent him from speaking further.\n\n\u201cDo not speak further, thou convalescent!\u201d\u2014so answered his animals, \u201cbut go out where the world waiteth for thee like a garden.\n\nGo out unto the roses, the bees, and the flocks of doves! Especially, however, unto the singing-birds, to learn singing from them!\n\nFor singing is for the convalescent; the sound ones may talk. And when the sound also want songs, then want they other songs than the convalescent.\u201d\n\n\u00a0\n\n\u2014O ye wags and barrel-organs, do be silent!\u201d answered Zarathustra, and smiled at his animals. \u201cHow well ye know what consolation I devised for myself in seven days!\n\nThat I have to sing once more\u2014that consolation did I devise for myself, and this convalescence: would ye also make another lyre-lay thereof?\u201d\n\n\u2014\u201cDo not talk further,\u201d answered his animals once more; \u201crather, thou convalescent, prepare for thyself first a lyre, a new lyre!\n\nFor behold, O Zarathustra! For thy new lays there are needed new lyres.\n\nSing and bubble over, O Zarathustra, heal thy soul with new lays: that thou mayest bear thy great fate, which hath not yet been any one\u2019s fate!\n\nFor thine animals know it well, O Zarathustra, who thou art and must become: behold, thou art the teacher of the eternal return,\u2014that is now thy fate!\n\nThat thou must be the first to teach this teaching\u2014how could this great fate not be thy greatest danger and infirmity!\n\nBehold, we know what thou teachest: that all things eternally return, and ourselves with them, and that we have already existed times without number, and all things with us.\n\nThou teachest that there is a great year of Becoming, a prodigy of a great year; it must, like a sand-glass, ever turn up anew, that it may anew run down and run out:\u2014\n\n\u2014So that all those years are like one another in the greatest and also in the smallest, so that we ourselves, in every great year, are like ourselves in the greatest and also in the smallest.\n\nAnd if thou wouldst now die, O Zarathustra, behold, we know also how thou wouldst then speak to thyself:\u2014but thine animals beseech thee not to die yet!\n\nThou wouldst speak, and without trembling, buoyant rather with bliss, for a great weight and worry would be taken from thee, thou patientest one!\u2014\n\n\u2018Now do I die and disappear,\u2019 wouldst thou say, \u2018and in a moment I am nothing. Souls are as mortal as bodies.\n\nBut the plexus of causes returneth in which I am intertwined,\u2014it will again create me! I myself pertain to the causes of the eternal return.\n\nI come again with this sun, with this earth, with this eagle, with this serpent\u2014not to a new life, or a better life, or a similar life:\n\n\u2014I come again eternally to this identical and selfsame life, in its greatest and its smallest, to teach again the eternal return of all things,\u2014\n\n\u2014To speak again the word of the great noontide of earth and man, to announce again to man the Superman.\n\nI have spoken my word. I break down by my word: so willeth mine eternal fate\u2014as announcer do I succumb!\n\nThe hour hath now come for the down-goer to bless himself. Thus\u2014endeth Zarathustra\u2019s down-going.\u201d\u2014\u2014\n\n\u00a0\n\nWhen the animals had spoken these words they were silent and waited, so that Zarathustra might say something to them; but Zarathustra did not hear that they were silent. On the contrary, he lay quietly with closed eyes like a person sleeping, although he did not sleep; for he communed just then with his soul. The serpent, however, and the eagle, when they found him silent in such wise, respected the great stillness around him, and prudently retired.\n\n\u00a0\n\n58. The Great Longing\n\nO my soul, I have taught thee to say \u201ctoday\u201d as \u201conce on a time\u201d and \u201cformerly,\u201d and to dance thy measure over every Here and There and Yonder.\n\nO my soul, I delivered thee from all by-places, I brushed down from thee dust and spiders and twilight.\n\nO my soul, I washed the petty shame and the by-place virtue from thee, and persuaded thee to stand naked before the eyes of the sun.\n\nWith the storm that is called \u201cspirit\u201d did I blow over thy surging sea; all clouds did I blow away from it; I strangled even the strangler called \u201csin.\u201d\n\nO my soul, I gave thee the right to say Nay like the storm, and to say Yea as the open heaven saith Yea: calm as the light remainest thou, and now walkest through denying storms.\n\nO my soul, I restored to thee liberty over the created and the uncreated; and who knoweth. as thou knowest, the voluptuousness of the future?\n\nO my soul, I taught thee the contempt which doth not come like worm-eating, the great, the loving contempt, which loveth most where it contemneth most.\n\nO my soul, I taught thee so to persuade that thou persuadest even the grounds themselves to thee: like the sun, which persuadeth even the sea to its height.\n\nO my soul, I have taken from thee all obeying and knee-bending and homage-paying; I have myself given thee the names, \u201cChange of need\u201d and \u201cFate.\u201d\n\nO my soul, I have given thee new names and gay-coloured playthings, I have called thee \u201cFate\u201d and \u201cthe Circuit of circuits\u201d and \u201cthe Navel-string of time\u201d and \u201cthe Azure bell.\u201d\n\nO my soul, to thy domain gave I all wisdom to drink all new wines, and also all immemorially old strong wines of wisdom.\n\nO my soul, every sun shed I upon thee, and every night and every silence and every longing:\u2014then grewest thou up for me as a vine.\n\nO my soul, exuberant and heavy dost thou now stand forth, a vine with swelling udders and full clusters of brown golden grapes:\u2014\n\n\u2014Filled and weighted by thy happiness, waiting from superabundance, and yet ashamed of thy waiting.\n\nO my soul, there is nowhere a soul which could be more loving and more comprehensive and more extensive! Where could future and past be closer together than with thee?\n\nO my soul, I have given thee everything, and all my hands have become empty by thee:\u2014and now! Now sayest thou to me, smiling and full of melancholy: \u201cWhich of us oweth thanks?\u2014\n\n\u2014Doth the giver not owe thanks because the receiver received? Is bestowing not a necessity? Is receiving not\u2014pitying?\u201d\n\nO my soul, I understand the smiling of thy melancholy: thine over-abundance itself now stretcheth out longing hands!\n\nThy fulness looketh forth over raging seas, and seeketh and waiteth: the longing of over-fulness looketh forth from the smiling heaven of thine eyes!\n\nAnd verily, O my soul! Who could see thy smiling and not melt into tears? The angels themselves melt into tears through the over-graciousness of thy smiling.\n\nThy graciousness and over-graciousness, is it which will not complain and weep: and yet, O my soul, longeth thy smiling for tears, and thy trembling mouth for sobs.\n\n\u201cIs not all weeping complaining? And all complaining, accusing?\u201d Thus speakest thou to thyself; and therefore, O my soul, wilt thou rather smile than pour forth thy grief\u2014-\n\n\u2014Than in gushing tears pour forth all thy grief concerning thy fulness, and concerning the craving of the vine for the vintager and vintage-knife!\n\nBut wilt thou not weep, wilt thou not weep forth thy purple melancholy, then wilt thou have to sing, O my soul!\u2014Behold. I smile myself, who foretell thee this:\n\n\u2014Thou wilt have to sing with passionate song, until all seas turn calm to hearken unto thy longing,\u2014\n\n\u2014Until over calm longing seas the bark giideth, the golden marvel, around the gold of which all good, bad, and marvellous things frisk:\u2014\n\n\u2014Also many large and small animals, and everything that hath light marvellous feet, so that it can run on violet-blue paths,\u2014\n\n\u2014Towards the golden marvel, the spontaneous bark, and its master: he, however, is the vintager who waiteth with the diamond vintage-knife,\u2014\n\n\u2014Thy great deliverer, O my soul, the nameless one\u2014for whom future songs only will find names! And verily, already hath thy breath the fragrance of future songs,\u2014\n\n\u2014Already glowest thou and dreamest, already drinkest thou thirstily at all deep echoing wells of consolation, aiready reposeth thy melancholy in the bliss of future songs!\u2014\u2014\n\nO my soul, now have I given thee all, and even my last possession, and all my hands have become empty by thee:\u2014that I bade thee sing, behold, that was my last thing to give!\n\nThat I bade thee sing,\u2014say now, say: which of us now\u2014oweth thanks?\u2014Better still, however: sing unto me, sing, O my soul! And let me thank thee!\u2014\n\n\u00a0\n\nThus spake Zarathustra.\n\n\u00a0\n\n59. The Second Dance Song\n\n\u00a0\n\n1\n\n\u201cInto thine eyes gazed I lately, O Life: gold saw I gleam in thy night-eyes.\u2014my heart stood still with delight:\n\n\u2014A golden bark saw I gleam on darkened waters, a sinking, drinking, reblinking, golden swing-bark!\n\nAt my dance-frantic foot, dost thou cast a glance, a laughing, questioning, melting, thrown glance:\n\nTwice only movedst thou thy rattle with thy little hands\u2014then did my feet swing with dance-fury.\u2014\n\nMy heels reared aloft, my toes they hearkened,\u2014thee they would know: hath not the dancer his ear\u2014in his toe!\n\nUnto thee did I spring: then fledst thou back from my bound; and towards me waved thy fleeing, flying tresses round!\n\nAway from thee did I spring, and from thy snaky tresses: then stoodst thou there half-turned, and in thine eye caresses.\n\nWith crooked glances\u2014dost thou teach me crooked courses; on crooked courses learn my feet\u2014crafty fancies!\n\nI fear thee near, I love thee far; thy flight allureth me, thy seeking secureth me:\u2014I suffer, but for thee, what would I not gladly bear!\n\nFor thee, whose coldness inflameth, whose hatred misleadeth, whose flight enchaineth, whose mockery\u2014pleadeth:\n\n\u2014Who would not hate thee, thou great bindress, in-windress, temptress, seekress, findress! Who would not love thee, thou innocent, impatient, wind-swift, child-eyed sinner!\n\nWhither pullest thou me now, thou paragon and tomboy? And now foolest thou me fleeing; thou sweet romp dost annoy!\n\nI dance after thee, I follow even faint traces lonely. Where art thou? Give me thy hand! Or thy finger only!\n\nHere are caves and thickets: we shall go astray!\u2014Halt! Stand still! Seest thou not owls and bats in fluttering fray?\n\nThou bat! Thou owl! Thou wouldst play me foul? Where are we? From the dogs hast thou learned thus to bark and howl.\n\nThou gnashest on me sweetly with little white teeth; thine evil eyes shoot out upon me, thy curly little mane from underneath!\n\nThis is a dance over stock and stone: I am the hunter,\u2014wilt thou be my hound, or my chamois anon?\n\nNow beside me! And quickly, wickedly springing! Now up! And over!\u2014Alas! I have fallen myself overswinging!\n\nOh, see me lying, thou arrogant one, and imploring grace: Gladly would I walk with thee\u2014in some lovelier place!\n\n\u2014In the paths of love, through bushes variegated, quiet, trim! Or there along the lake, where gold-fishes dance and swim!\n\n\u201cThou art now a-weary? There above are sheep and sun-set stripes: is it not sweet to sleep\u2014the shepherd pipes?\n\nThou art so very weary? I carry thee thither; let just thine arm sink! And art thou thirsty\u2014I should have something; but thy mouth would not like it to drink!\u2014\n\n\u2014Oh, that cursed, nimble, supple serpent and lurking- witch! Where art thou gone? But in my face do I feel through thy hand, two spots and red blotches itch!\n\nI am verily weary of it, ever thy sheepish shepherd to be Thou witch, if I have hitherto sung unto thee, now shalt show\u2014cry unto me!\n\nTo the rhythm of my whip shalt thou dance and cry! I forget not my whip?\u2014Not I!\u201d\u2014\n\n2\n\nThen did Life answer me thus, and kept thereby her fine ears closed:\n\n\u201cO Zarathustra! Crack not so terribly with thy whip! Thou knowest surely that noise killeth thought,\u2014and just now there came to me such delicate thoughts.\n\nWe are both of us genuine ne\u2019er-do-wells and ne\u2019er-do-ills. Beyond good and evil found we our island and our green meadow\u2014we two alone! Therefore must we be friendly to each other!\n\nAnd even should we not love each other from the bottom of our hearts,\u2014must we then have a grudge against each other if we do not love each other perfectly?\n\nAnd that I am friendly to thee, and often too friendly, that knowest thou: and the reason is that I am envious of thy Wisdom. Ah, this mad old fool, Wisdom!\n\nIf thy Wisdom should one day run away from thee, ah! then would also my love run away from thee quickly.\u201d\u2014\n\n\u00a0\n\nThereupon did Life look thoughtfully behind and around, and said softly: \u201cO Zarathustra, thou art not faithful enough to me!\n\nThou lovest me not nearly so much as thou sayest; I know thou thinkest of soon leaving me.\n\nThere is an old heavy, heavy, booming-clock: it boometh by night up to thy cave:\u2014\n\n\u2014When thou hearest this clock strike the hours at midnight, then thinkest thou between one and twelve thereon\u2014\n\n\u2014Thou thinkest thereon, O Zarathustra, I know it\u2014of soon leaving me!\u201d\u2014\n\n\u201cYea,\u201d answered I, hesitatingly, \u201cbut thou knowest it also\u201d\u2014And I said something into her ear, in amongst her confused, yellow, foolish tresses.\n\n\u201cThou knowest that, O Zarathustra? That knoweth no one\u2014\u2014\u201d\n\n\u00a0\n\nAnd we gazed at each other, and looked at the green meadow o\u2019er which the cool evening was just passing, and we wept together.\u2014Then, however, was Life dearer unto me than all my Wisdom had ever been.\u2014\n\n\u00a0\n\nThus spoke Zarathustra.\n\n\u00a0\n\n3\n\nOne!\n\nO man! Take heed!\n\nTwo!\n\nWhat saith deep midnight\u2019s voice indeed?\n\nThree!\n\n\u201cI slept my sleep\u2014\n\nFour!\n\n\u201cFrom deepest dream I\u2019ve woke and plead:\u2014\n\nFive!\n\n\u201cThe world is deep,\n\nSix!\n\n\u201cAnd deeper than the day could read.\n\nSeven!\n\n\u201cDeep is its woe\u2014\n\nEight!\n\n\u201cJoy\u2014deeper still than grief can be:\n\nNine!\n\n\u201cWoe saith: Hence! Go!\n\nTen!\n\n\u201cBut joys all want eternity\u2014\n\nEleven!\n\n\u201cWant deep profound eternity!\u201d\n\nTwelve!\n\n\u00a0\n\n60. The Seven Seals\n\n(or The Yea and Amen Lay.)\n\n\u00a0\n\n1\n\nIf I be a diviner and full of the divining spirit which wandereth on high mountain-ridges, \u2019twixt two seas,\u2014\n\nWandereth \u2019twixt the past and the future as a heavy cloud\u2014hostile to sultry plains, and to all that is weary and can neither die nor live:\n\nReady for lightning in its dark bosom, and for the redeeming flash of light, charged with lightnings which say Yea! which laugh Yea! ready for divining flashes of lightning:\u2014\n\n\u2014Blessed, however, is he who is thus charged! And verily, long must he hang like a heavy tempest on the mountain, who shall one day kindle the light of the future!\u2014\n\nOh, how could I not be ardent for Eternity and for the marriage-ring of rings\u2014the ring of the return?\n\nNever yet have I found the woman by whom I should like to have children, unless it be this woman whom I love: for I love thee, O Eternity!\n\nFor I love thee, O Eternity!\n\n\u00a0\n\n2\n\nIf ever my wrath hath burst graves, shifted landmarks, or rolled old shattered tables into precipitous depths:\n\nIf ever my scorn hath scattered mouldered words to the winds, and if I have come like a besom to cross-spiders, and as a cleansing wind to old charnel-houses:\n\nIf ever I have sat rejoicing where old gods lie buried, world-blessing, world-loving, beside the monuments of old world-maligners:\u2014\n\n\u2014For even churches and gods\u2019-graves do I love, if only heaven looketh through their ruined roofs with pure eyes; gladly do I sit like grass and red poppies on ruined churches\u2014\n\nOh, how could I not be ardent for Eternity, and for the marriage-ring of rings\u2014the ring of the return?\n\nNever yet have I found the woman by whom I should like to have children, unless it be this woman whom I love: for I love thee, O Eternity!\n\nFor I love thee, O Eternity!\n\n\u00a0\n\n3\n\nIf ever a breath hath come to me of the creative breath, and of the heavenly necessity which compelleth even chances to dance star-dances:\n\nIf ever I have laughed with the laughter of the creative lightning, to which the long thunder of the deed followeth, grumblingly, but obediently:\n\nIf ever I have played dice with the gods at the divine table of the earth, so that the earth quaked and ruptured, and snorted forth fire-streams:\u2014\n\n\u2014For a divine table is the earth, and trembling with new creative dictums and dice-casts of the gods:\n\nOh, how could I not be ardent for Eternity, and for the marriage-ring of rings\u2014the ring of the return?\n\nNever yet have I found the woman by whom I should like to have children, unless it be this woman whom I love: for I love thee, O Eternity!\n\nFor I love thee, O Eternity!\n\n\u00a0\n\n4\n\nIf ever I have drunk a full draught of the foaming spice- and confection-bowl in which all things are well mixed:\n\nIf ever my hand hath mingled the furthest with the nearest, fire with spirit, joy with sorrow, and the harshest with the kindest:\n\nIf I myself am a grain of the saving salt which maketh everything in the confection-bowl mix well:\u2014\n\n\u2014For there is a salt which uniteth good with evil; and even the evilest is worthy, as spicing and as final over-foaming:\u2014\n\nOh, how could I not be ardent for Eternity, and for the marriage-ring of rings\u2014the ring of the return?\n\nNever yet have I found the woman by whom I should like to have children, unless it be this woman whom I love: for I love thee, O Eternity!\n\nFor I love thee, O Eternity!\n\n\u00a0\n\n5\n\nIf I be fond of the sea, and all that is sealike, and fondest of it when it angrily contradicteth me:\n\nIf the exploring delight be in me, which impelleth sails to the undiscovered, if the seafarer\u2019s delight be in my delight:\n\nIf ever my rejoicing hath called out: \u201cThe shore hath vanished,\u2014now hath fallen from me the last chain\u2014\n\nThe boundless roareth around me, far away sparkle for me space and time,\u2014well! cheer up! old heart!\u201d\u2014\n\nOh, how could I not be ardent for Eternity, and for the marriage-ring of rings\u2014the ring of the return?\n\nNever yet have I found the woman by whom I should like to have children, unless it be this woman whom I love: for I love thee, O Eternity!\n\nFor I love thee, O Eternity!\n\n\u00a0\n\n6\n\nIf my virtue be a dancer\u2019s virtue, and if I have often sprung with both feet into golden-emerald rapture:\n\nIf my wickedness be a laughing wickedness, at home among rose-banks and hedges of lilies:\n\n\u2014or in laughter is all evil present, but it is sanctified and absolved by its own bliss:\u2014\n\nAnd if it be my Alpha and Omega that everything heavy shall become light, everybody a dancer, and every spirit a bird: and verily, that is my Alpha and Omega!\u2014\n\nOh, how could I not be ardent for Eternity, and for the marriage-ring of rings\u2014the ring of the return?\n\nNever yet have I found the woman by whom I should like to have children, unless it be this woman whom I love: for I love thee, O Eternity!\n\nFor I love thee, O Eternity!\n\n\u00a0\n\n7\n\nIf ever I have spread out a tranquil heaven above me, and have flown into mine own heaven with mine own pinions:\n\nIf I have swum playfully in profound luminous distances, and if my freedom\u2019s avian wisdom hath come to me:\u2014\n\n\u2014Thus however speaketh avian wisdom:\u2014\u201cLo, there is no above and no below! Throw thyself about,\u2014outward, backward, thou light one! Sing! speak no more!\n\n\u2014Are not all words made for the heavy? Do not all words lie to the light ones? Sing! speak no more!\u201d\u2014\n\nOh, how could I not be ardent for Eternity, and for the marriage-ring of rings\u2014the ring of the return?\n\nNever yet have I found the woman by whom I should like to have children, unless it be this woman whom I love: for I love thee, O Eternity!\n\nFor I love thee, O Eternity!","title":"Thus Spake Zarathustra/Part Three","tradition":"philosophy-ethics","translated_text":null,"word_count":22971}