The Portable Nietzsche

by Friedrich Nietzsche

Faith does not offer the least support for a proof of objective truth. Here the ways of men part: if you wish to strive for peace of soul and pleasure, then believe; if you wish to be a devotee of truth, then inquire. . . .

FRAGMENT OF A CRITIQUE OF SCHOPENHAUER (1867) . . . The errors of great men are venerable because they are more fruitful than the truths of little men. . . .

What the philosophers call character is an incurable disease.

The unchangeable character is influenced in its expressions by its environment and education—not in its essence. A popular ethics therefore wants to suppress bad expressions as far as possible, for the sake of the general welfare—an undertaking that is strikingly similar to the police. The means for this is a religion with rewards and punishments: for the expressions alone matter. Therefore the catechism can say: Thou shalt not kill! Thou shalt not curse! etc. Nonsensical, however, is an imperative: “Be good!” as well as, “Be wise!” or, “Be talented!” The “general welfare” is not the sphere of truth; for truth demands to be declared even if it is ugly and unethical.

How characteristic are question and answer when a noted opponent of Pericles is asked whether he or Pericles is the best wrestler in the city, and answers: “Even when I throw him down, he denies that he fell and attains his purpose, persuading even those who saw him fall.” If one wants to observe this conviction—wholly undisguised in its most naïve expression—that the contest is necessary to preserve the health of the state, then one should reflect on the original meaning of ostracism, for example, as it is pronounced by the Ephesians when they banish Hermodorus: “Among us, no one shall be the best; but if someone is, then let him be elsewhere and among others.” Why should no one be the best? Because then the contest would come to an end and the eternal source of life for the Hellenic state would be endangered. . . . Originally this curious institution is not a safety valve but a means of stimulation: the individual who towers above the rest is eliminated so that the contest of forces may reawaken—an idea that is hostile to the “exclusiveness” of genius in the modern sense and presupposes that in the natural order of things there are always several geniuses who spur each other to action, even as they hold each other within the limits of measure. That is the core of the Hellenic notion of the contest: it abominates the rule of one and fears its dangers; it desires, as a protection against the genius, another genius. Every talent must unfold itself in fighting: that is the c...

This beautiful world history is, in Heraclitean terms, “a chaotic pile of rubbish.” What is strong wins: that is the universal law. If only it were not so often precisely what is stupid and evil!

Conclusion: Every story must have an aim, hence also the history of a people and the history of the world. That means: because there is “world history” there must also be some aim in the world process. That means: we demand stories only with aims. But we do not at all demand stories about the world process, for we consider it a swindle to talk about it. That my life has no aim is evident even from the accidental nature of its origin; that I can posit an aim for myself is another matter. But a state has no aim; we alone give it this aim or that.

FROM On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense5 (1873) In some remote corner of the universe, poured out and glittering in innumerable solar systems, there once was a star on which clever animals invented knowledge. That was the haughtiest and most mendacious minute of “world history”—yet only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths the star grew cold, and the clever animals had to die. One might invent such a fable and still not have illustrated sufficiently how wretched, how shadowy and flighty, how aimless and arbitrary, the human intellect appears in nature. There have been eternities when it did not exist; and when it is done for again, nothing will have happened. For this intellect has no further mission that would lead beyond human life. It is human, rather, and only its owner and producer gives it such importance, as if the world pivoted around it. But if we could communicate with the mosquito, then we would learn that it floats through the air with the same self-importance, feeling within itself the flying center of the world. There is nothing in nature so despicable or insignificant that it cannot immediately be blown up like a bag by a slight breath of this power of knowledge; and just as every porter wants an admirer, the proudest human being, the philosopher, thinks that he sees the eyes of the universe telescopically focused from all sides on his actions and thoughts. It is strange that this should be the effect of the intellect, for after all it was gi...

The political defeat of Greece was the greatest failure of culture: for it has brought with it the revolting theory that one can foster culture only when one is armed to the teeth and wears boxing gloves. The rise of Christianity was the second great failure: raw power there and the dull intellect here became victors over the aristocratic genius among the nations. Being a Hellenophile means: being an enemy of raw power and dull intellects. In this way Sparta was the ruin of Hellas, for she forced Athens to become active in a federation and to throw herself entirely into politics.

For once I want to enumerate everything that I no longer believe; also what I believe. In the great whirlpool of forces man stands with the conceit that this whirlpool is rational and has a rational aim: an error! The only rational thing we know is what little reason man has: he must exert it a lot, and it is always ruinous for him when he abandons himself, say, to “Providence.” The only happiness lies in reason; all the rest of the world is dismal. The highest reason, however, I see in the work of the artist, and he may experience it as such; there may also be something that, if only it could be produced consciously, would result in a still greater feeling of reason and happiness: for example, the course of the solar system, begetting and educating a human being. Happiness lies in the swiftness of feeling and thinking: all the rest of the world is slow, gradual, and stupid. Whoever could feel the course of a light ray would be very happy, for it is very swift. Thinking of oneself gives little happiness. If, however, one feels much happiness in this, it is because at bottom one is not thinking of oneself but of one’s ideal. This is far, and only the swift reach it and are delighted. (VII, 211 f.)

The artist’s sense of truth. Regarding truths, the artist has a weaker morality than the thinker. He definitely does not want to be deprived of the splendid and profound interpretations of life, and he resists sober, simple methods and results. Apparently he fights for the higher dignity and significance of man; in truth, he does not want to give up the most effective presuppositions of his art: the fantastic, mythical, uncertain, extreme, the sense for the symbolic, the overestimation of the person, the faith in some miraculous element in the genius. Thus he considers the continued existence of his kind of creation more important than scientific devotion to the truth in every form, however plain.

So the famous struggle for existence does not seem to me to be the only point of view from which to explain the progress or the strengthening of a human being or a race. Rather, two things must come together: first, the increase of stable power through close spiritual ties such as faith and communal feeling; then, the possibility of reaching higher goals through the appearance of degenerate types and, as a consequence, a partial weakening and wounding of the stable power: it is precisely the weaker natures who, being more delicate and freer, make progress possible. A people who crumble somewhere and become weak, but remain strong and healthy on the whole, are able to accept the infection of the new and absorb it to their advantage. In the case of the individual the task of education is this: to put him on his path so firmly and surely that, as a whole, he can never again be diverted. Then, however, the educator must wound him, or utilize the wounds destiny inflicts upon him; and when pain and need have thus developed, something new and noble can then be inoculated in the wounded spots. His whole nature will absorb this, and later, in its fruits, show the ennoblement. Concerning the state, Machiavelli says that “the form of government is of very little importance, although the half-educated think otherwise. The great goal of statesmanship should be duration, which outweighs everything else because it is far more valuable than freedom.” Only where the greatest duration is se...

Why one contradicts. One often contradicts an opinion when it is really only the tone in which it has been presented that is unsympathetic.

The experience of Socrates. When one has become a master in some field one has usually, for that very reason, remained a complete amateur in most other things; but one judges just the other way around, as Socrates had already found out. This is what makes association with masters disagreeable.

The European man and the abolition of nations. Trade and industry, books and letters, the way in which all higher culture is shared, the rapid change of house and scenery, the present nomadic life of everyone who is not a landowner—these circumstances necessarily produce a weakening, and finally the abolition, of nations, at least in Europe; and as a consequence of continual intermarriage there must develop a mixed race, that of the European man. . . . It is not the interest of the many (of peoples), as is often claimed, but above all the interest of certain royal dynasties and also of certain classes in commerce and society, that drives to nationalism. Once one has recognized this, one should declare oneself without embarrassment as a good European and work actively for the amalgamation of nations. In this process the Germans could be helpful by virtue of their long proven skill as interpreters and mediators among peoples. Incidentally, the whole problem of the Jews exists only in nation states, for here their energy and higher intelligence, their accumulated capital of spirit and will, gathered from generation to generation through a long schooling in suffering, must become so preponderant as to arouse mass envy and hatred. In almost all contemporary nations, therefore—in direct proportion to the degree to which they act up nationalistically—the literary obscenity is spreading of leading the Jews to slaughter as scapegoats of every conceivable public and internal misfort...

Enemies of truth. Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.

Not suitable as a party member. Whoever thinks much is not suitable as a party member: he soon thinks himself right through the party.

Clever people may learn as much as they wish of the results of science—still one will always notice in their conversation, and especially in their hypotheses, that they lack the scientific spirit; they do not have that instinctive mistrust of the aberrations of thought which through long training are deeply rooted in the soul of every scientific person. They are content to find any hypothesis at all concerning some matter; then they are all fire and flame for it and think that is enough. To have an opinion means for them to fanaticize for it and thenceforth to press it to their hearts as a conviction. If something is unexplained, they grow hot over the first notion that comes into their heads and looks like an explanation—which results progressively in the worst consequences, especially in the sphere of politics. For that reason everyone should now study at least one science from the bottom up: then he will know what method means and how important is the utmost circumspection. . . .

“Love.” The most subtle artifice that distinguishes Christianity from other religions is a word: it speaks of love. Thus it became the lyrical religion (whereas in both their other creations the Semites presented the world with heroic-epic religions). There is something so ambiguous and suggestive about the word love, something that speaks to memory and to hope, that even the lowest intelligence and the coldest heart still feel something of the glimmer of this word. The cleverest woman and the most vulgar man recall the relatively least selfish moments of their whole life, even if Eros has taken only a low flight with them; and for those countless ones who miss love, whether from their parents or their children or their beloved, and especially for people with sublimated sexuality, Christianity has always been a find.

Readers of aphorisms. The worst readers of aphorisms are the author’s friends if they are intent on guessing back from the general to the particular instance to which the aphorism owes its origin; for with such pot-peeking they reduce the author’s whole effort to nothing; so that they deservedly gain, not a philosophic outlook or instruction, but—at best, or at worst—nothing more than the satisfaction of vulgar curiosity.

Every philosophy is the philosophy of some stage of life. The stage of life at which a philosopher found his doctrine reverberates through it; he cannot prevent this, however far above time and hour he may feel. Thus Schopenhauer’s philosophy remains the reflection of ardent and melancholy youth—it is no way of thinking for older people. And Plato’s philosophy recalls the middle thirties, when a cold and a hot torrent often roar toward each other, so that a mist and tender little clouds form—and under favorable circumstances and the rays of the sun, an enchanting rainbow.

The journey to Hades. I too have been in the underworld, like Odysseus, and I shall yet return there often; and not only sheep have I sacrificed to be able to talk with a few of the dead, but I have not spared my own blood. Four pairs did not deny themselves to me as I sacrificed: Epicurus and Montaigne, Goethe and Spinoza, Plato and Rousseau, Pascal and Schopenhauer. With these I must come to terms when I have long wandered by myself; they shall tell me whether I am right or wrong; to them I want to listen when, in the process, they tell each other whether they are right or wrong. . . .

The means to real peace. No government admits any more that it keeps an army to satisfy occasionally the desire for conquest. Rather the army is supposed to serve for defense, and one invokes the morality that approves of self-defense. But this implies one’s own morality and the neighbor’s immorality; for the neighbor must be thought of as eager to attack and conquer if our state must think of means of self-defense. Moreover, the reasons we give for requiring an army imply that our neighbor, who denies the desire for conquest just as much as does our own state, and who, for his part, also keeps an army only for reasons of self-defense, is a hypocrite and a cunning criminal who would like nothing better than to overpower a harmless and awkward victim without any fight. Thus all states are now ranged against each other: they presuppose their neighbor’s bad disposition and their own good disposition. This presupposition, however, is inhumane, as bad as war and worse. At bottom, indeed, it is itself the challenge and the cause of wars, because, as I have said, it attributes immorality to the neighbor and thus provokes a hostile disposition and act. We must abjure the doctrine of the army as a means of self-defense just as completely as the desire for conquests. And perhaps the great day will come when a people, distinguished by wars and victories and by the highest development of a military order and intelligence, and accustomed to make the heaviest sacrifices for these things...

A girl who surrenders her virginity to a man who has not first sworn solemnly before witnesses that he will not leave her again for the rest of her life not only is considered imprudent but is also called immoral. She did not follow the mores; she was not only imprudent but also disobedient, for she knew what the mores commanded. Where the mores command differently, the conduct of the girl in such a case would not be called immoral either; in fact, there are regions where it is considered moral to lose one’s virginity before marriage. Thus the reproach is really directed against disobedience: it is this that is immoral. Is this sufficient? Such a girl is considered contemptible—but what kind of disobedience is it that one despises? (Imprudence is not despised.) One says of her: she could not control herself, that is why she was disobedient against the mores; thus it is the blindness of the desire that one despises, the animal in the girl. With this in mind, one also says: she is unchaste; by this one could not mean that she is doing what the lawfully wedded wife does, too, without being called unchaste. The mores are then seen to demand that one bear the displeasure of unsatisfied desire, that the desire be able to wait. To be immoral means therefore, in this case, not to be able to bear a displeasure despite the thought of the power that makes the rules. A feeling is supposed to be subdued by a thought—more precisely, by the thought of fear (whether it be fear of the sacr...

The first Christian. All the world still believes in the authorship of the “Holy Spirit” or is at least still affected by this belief: when one opens the Bible one does so for “edification.” . . . That it also tells the story of one of the most ambitious and obtrusive of souls, of a head as superstitious as it was crafty, the story of the apostle Paul—who knows this, except a few scholars? Without this strange story, however, without the confusions and storms of such a head, such a soul, there would be no Christianity; we should scarcely have heard of a small Jewish sect whose master died on the cross. Of course, if this story had been understood in time; if Paul’s writings had been read not as revelations of the “Holy Spirit” but with an honest and free spirit of one’s own, and without at the same time thinking of all our personal troubles, if they had really been read—and for a millennium and a half there were no such readers—then Christianity would have been done for long ago: so much do these pages of the Jewish Pascal expose the origin of Christianity, just as the pages of the French Pascal expose its destiny and that of which it will perish. That the ship of Christianity threw overboard a good deal of its Jewish ballast, that it went, and was able to go, among the pagans—that was due to this one man, a very tortured, very pitiful, very unpleasant man, unpleasant even to himself. He suffered from a fixed idea—or more precisely, from a fixed, ever-present, never restin...

Thinking evil means making evil. The passions become evil and insidious when they are considered evil and insidious. Thus Christianity has succeeded in turning Eros and Aphrodite—great powers, capable of idealization—into hellish goblins. . . . In themselves the sexual feelings, like those of pity and adoration, are such that one human being thereby gives pleasure to another human being through his delight; one does not encounter such beneficent arrangements too frequently in nature. And to slander just such a one and to corrupt it through bad conscience! To associate the procreation of man with bad conscience! In the end this transformation of Eros into a devil wound up as a comedy: gradually the “devil” Eros became more interesting to men than all the angels and saints, thanks to the whispering and the secret-mongering of the Church in all erotic matters: this has had the effect, right into our own time, of making the love story the only real interest shared by all circles—in an exaggeration which would have been incomprehensible in antiquity and which will yet be laughed at someday. . . .

The philology of Christianity. How little Christianity educates the sense of honesty and justice can be seen pretty well from the writings of its scholars: they advance their conjectures as blandly as dogmas and are hardly ever honestly perplexed by the exegesis of a Biblical verse. Again and again they say, “I am right, for it is written,” and the interpretation that follows is of such impudent arbitrariness that a philologist is stopped in his tracks, torn between anger and laughter, and keeps asking himself: Is it possible? Is this honest? Is it even decent? What dishonesties of this sort are still perpetrated from Protestant pulpits today, how crudely the preachers exploit the advantage that nobody can interrupt them, how the Bible is pricked and pulled and the art of reading badly formally inculcated upon the people—all this will be underestimated only by those who go to church either never or always. In the end, however, what are we to expect of the aftereffects of a religion that enacted during the centuries of its foundation that unheard-of philological farce about the Old Testament? I refer to the attempt to pull away the Old Testament from under the feet of the Jews—wi...

One becomes moral—not because one is moral. Submission to morality can be slavish or vain or selfish or resigned or obtusely enthusiastic or thoughtless or an act of desperation, like sub...

As little state as possible. All political and economic arrangements are not worth it, that precisely the most gifted spirits should be permitted, or even obliged, to manage them: such a waste of spirit is really worse than an extremity. These are and remain fields of work for the lesser heads, and other than lesser heads should not be at the service of this workshop: it were better to let the machine go to pieces again. . . . At such a price, one pays far too dearly for the “general security”; and what is most insane, one also produces the very opposite of the general security, as our dear century is undertaking to prove—as if it had never been proved before. To make society secure against thieves and fireproof and infinitely comfortable for every trade and activity, and to transform the state into Providence in the good and bad sense—these are low, mediocre, and not at all indispensable goals, for which one should not strive with the highest means and instruments anywhere in existence, the means one ought to reserve for the highest and rarest ends. Our time, however much it talks of economy, is a squanderer: it squanders what is most precious, the spirit.

Promoting health. We have scarcely begun to reflect on the physiology of the criminal, and yet we are already confronted with the indisputable realization that there is no essential difference between criminals and the insane—presupposing that one believes that the customary way of moral thinking is the way of thinking of spiritual health. No faith, however, is still as firmly believed as this, and so we should not shrink from drawing its consequences by treating the criminal as an insane person: above all, not with haughty mercy but with the physician’s good sense and good will. A change of air, different company, temporary disappearance, perhaps being alone and having a new occupation, are what he needs. Good! Perhaps he himself considers it to his advantage to live in custody for a while to find protection against himself and a burdensome tyrannical urge. Good! One should present him quite clearly with the possibility and the means of a cure (the extirpation, reshaping, and sublimation of that drive); also, in a bad case, with the improbability of a cure; and one should offer the incurable criminal, who has become a horror to himself, the opportunity to commit suicide. Reserving this as the most extreme means of relief, one should not neglect anything to give back to the criminal, above all, confidence and a free mind; one should wipe pangs of conscience from his soul as some uncleanliness and give him pointers as to how he might balance and outbid the harm be may have ...

Of the people of Israel. Among the spectacles to which the next century invites us is the decision on the fate of the European Jews. . . . Every Jew has in the history of his fathers and grandfathers a mine of examples of the coldest composure and steadfastness in terrible situations. . . . There has been an effort to make them contemptible by treating them contemptibly for two thousand years and by barring them from access to all honors and everything honorable, thus pushing them that much deeper into the dirtier trades; and under this procedure they have certainly not become cleaner. But contemptible? They themselves have never ceased to believe in their calling to the highest things, and the virtues of all who suffer have never ceased to adorn them. The way in which they honor their fathers and their children and the rationality of their marriages and marital customs distinguish them above all Europeans. In addition, they knew how to create for themselves a feeling of power and eternal revenge out of those very trades which were abandoned to them (or to which they were abandoned); one must say, in excuse even of their usury, that without this occasional, agreeable, and useful torture of their despisers they could scarcely have persevered so long in respecting themselves. For our self-respect depends on our ability to repay the good as well as the bad. Moreover, their revenge does not easily push them too far; for they all have that freemindedness, of the soul too, to wh...

POSTCARD TO OVERBECK (Sils Maria, July 30, 1881) I am utterly amazed, utterly enchanted. I have a precursor, and what a precursor! I hardly knew Spinoza: that I should have turned to him just now, was inspired by “instinct.” Not only is his over-all tendency like mine—making knowledge the most powerful affect —but in five main points of his doctrine I recognize myself; this most unusual and loneliest thinker is closest to me precisely in these matters: he denies the freedom of the will, teleology, the moral world order, the unegoistic, and evil. Even though the divergencies are admittedly tremendous, they are due more to the difference in time, culture, and science. In summa: my lonesomeness, which, as on very high mountains, often made it hard for me to breathe and made my blood rush out, is now at least a twosomeness. Strange. Incidentally, I am not at all as well as I had hoped. Exceptional weather here too. Eternal change of atmospheric conditions—that will yet drive me out of Europe. I must have clear skies for months, else I get nowhere. Already six severe attacks of two or three days each. With affectionate love, your friend.

Does one know the moral effects of food? Is there a philosophy of nourishment? (The ever-renewed clamor for and against vegetarianism is sufficient proof that there is no such philosophy as yet.)

Historia abscondita. Every great human being has a retroactive force: all history is again placed in the scales for his sake, and a thousand secrets of the past crawl out of their hideouts—into his sun. There is no way of telling what may yet become history some day. Perhaps the past is still essentially undiscovered! So many retroactive forces are still required!

The Madman. Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market place, and cried incessantly, “I seek God! I seek God!” As many of those who do not believe in God were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter. Why, did he get lost? said one. Did he lose his way like a child? said another. Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? or emigrated? Thus they yelled and laughed. The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his glances. “Whither is God” he cried. “I shall tell you. We have killed him—you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how have we done this? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What did we do when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving now? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there any up or down left? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night and more night coming on all the while? Must not lanterns be lit in the morning? Do we not hear anything yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we not smell anything yet of God’s decomposition? Gods too decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we, the murderers of all murderers, comfort ourselves? What was holies...

Kant’s joke. Kant wanted to prove in a way that would dumfound the common man that the common man was right: that was the secret joke of this soul. He wrote against the scholars in favor of the p...

As interpreters of our experiences. A kind of honesty has been alien to all founders of religions and others like them: they have never made their experiences a matter of conscience for knowledge. “What did I really experience? What happened in me then, and around me? Was my reason bright enough? Was my will turned against all deceptions of the senses and was it courageous in its resistance to the fantastic?”—none of them has raised such questions; all the dear religious people still do not raise such questions even now: rather, they have a thirst for things that are against reason, and they do not want to make it too hard for themselves to satisfy it. And so they experience “miracles” and “rebirths” and hear the voices of the little angels! We, however, we others, who thirst for reason, want to look our experiences as straight in the eye as if they represented a scientific experiment, hour after hour, day after day. We ourselves want to be our experiments and guinea pigs.

The greatest stress. How, if some day or night a demon were to sneak after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you, “This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything immeasurably small or great in your life must return to you—all in the same succession and sequence—even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned over and over, and you with it, a dust grain of dust.” Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or did you once experience a tremendous moment when you would have answered him, “You are a god, and never have I heard anything more godly.” If this thought were to gain possession of you, it would change you, as you are, or perhaps crush you. The question in each and every thing, “Do you want this once more and innumerable times more?” would weigh upon your actions as the greatest stress. Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?

“I would give away and distribute, until the wise among men find joy once again in their folly, and the poor in their riches.

“Verily, a polluted stream is man. One must be a sea to be able to receive a polluted stream without becoming unclean. Behold, I teach you the overman: he is this sea; in him your great contempt can go under. “What is the greatest experience you can have? It is the hour of the great contempt. The hour in which your happiness, too, arouses your disgust, and even your reason and your virtue. “The hour when you say, ‘What matters my happiness? It is poverty and filth and wretched contentment. But my happiness ought to justify existence itself.’ “The hour when you say, ‘What matters my reason? Does it crave knowledge as the lion his food? It is poverty and filth and wretched contentment.’ “The hour when you say, ‘What matters my virtue? As yet it has not made me rage. How weary I am of my good and my evil! All that is poverty and filth and wretched contentment.’ “The hour when you say, ‘What matters my justice? I do not see that I am flames and fuel. But the just are flames and fuel.’ “The hour when you say, ‘What matters my pity? Is not pity the cross on which he is nailed who loves man? But my pity is no crucifixion.’ “Have you yet spoken thus? Have you yet cried thus? Oh, that I might have heard you cry thus! “Not your sin but your thrift cries to heaven; your meanness even in your sin cries to heaven. “Where is the lightning to lick you with its tongue? Where is the frenzy with which you should be inoculated? “Behold, I teach you the overman: he is this lightning, he is th...

“I love him who chastens his god because he loves his god: for he must perish of the wrath of his god. “I love him whose soul is deep, even in being wounded, and who can perish of a small experience: thus he goes gladly over the bridge.

“I say unto you: one must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star. I say unto you: you still have chaos in yourselves.

In the loneliest desert, however, the second metamorphosis occurs: here the spirit becomes a lion who would conquer his freedom and be master in his own desert. Here he seeks out his last master: he wants to fight him and his last god; for ultimate victory he wants to fight with the great dragon. Who is the great dragon whom the spirit will no longer call lord and god? “Thou shalt” is the name of the great dragon. But the spirit of the lion says, “I will.” “Thou shalt” lies in his way, sparkling like gold, an animal covered with scales; and on every scale shines a golden “thou shalt.” Values, thousands of years old, shine on these scales; and thus speaks the mightiest of all dragons: “All value of all things shines on me. All value has long been created, and I am all created value. Verily, there shall be no more ‘I will.’ ” Thus speaks the dragon. My brothers, why is there a need in the spirit for the lion? Why is not the beast of burden, which renounces and is reverent, enough? To create new values—that even the lion cannot do; but the creation of freedom for oneself for new creation—that is within the power of the lion. The creation of freedom for oneself and a sacred “No” even to duty—for that, my brothers, the lion is needed. To assume the right to new values—that is the most terrifying assumption for a reverent spirit that would bear much. Verily, to him it is preying, and a matter for a beast of prey. He once loved “thou shalt” as most sacred: now he must find illusi...

“Blessed are the sleepy ones: for they shall soon drop off.” Thus spoke Zarathustra.

Verily, all being is hard to prove and hard to induce to speak. Tell me, my brothers, is not the strangest of all things proved most nearly? Indeed, this ego and the ego’s contradiction and confusion still speak most honestly of its being—this creating, willing, valuing ego, which is the measure and value of things. And this most honest being, the ego, speaks of the body and still wants the body, even when it poetizes and raves and flutters with broken wings. It learns to speak ever more honestly, this ego: and the more it learns, the more words and honors it finds for body and earth. A new pride my ego taught me, and this I teach men: no longer to bury one’s head in the sand of heavenly things, but to bear it freely, an earthly head, which creates a meaning for the earth. A new will I teach men: to will this way which man has walked blindly, and to affirm it, and no longer to sneak away from it like the sick and decaying. It was the sick and decaying who despised body and earth and invented the heavenly realm and the redemptive drops of blood: but they took even these sweet and gloomy poisons from body and earth. They wanted to escape their own misery, and the stars were too far for them. So they sighed: “Would that there were heavenly ways to sneak into another state of being and happiness!” Thus they invented their sneaky ruses and bloody potions. Ungrateful, these people deemed themselves transported from their bodies and this earth. But to whom did they owe the convul...

“I,” you say, and are proud of the word. But greater is that in which you do not wish to have faith—your body and its great reason: that does not say “I,” but does “I.”

Behind your thoughts and feelings, my brother, there stands a mighty ruler, an unknown sage—whose name is self. In your body he dwells; he is your body. There is more reason in your body than in your best wisdom. And who knows why your body needs precisely your best wisdom? Your self laughs at your ego and at its bold leaps. “What are these leaps and flights of thought to me?” it says to itself. “A detour to my end. I am the leading strings of the ego and the prompter of its concepts.” The self says to the ego, “Feel pain here!” Then the ego suffers and thinks how it might suffer no more—and that is why it is made to think. The self says to the ego, “Feel pleasure here!” Then the ego is pleased and thinks how it might often be pleased again—and that is why it is made to think. I want to speak to the despisers of the body. It is their respect that begets their contempt. What is it that created respect and contempt and worth and will? The creative self created respect and contempt; it created pleasure and pain. The creative body created the spirit as a hand for its will. Even in your folly and contempt, you despisers of the body, you serve your self. I say unto you: your self itself wants to die and turns away from life. It is no longer capable of what it would do above all else: to create beyond itself. That is what it would do above all else, that is its fervent wish. But now it is too late for it to do this: so your self wants to go under, O despisers of the body. Your se...

My brother, if you have a virtue and she is your virtue, then you have her in common with nobody. To be sure, you want to call her by name and pet her; you want to pull her ear and have fun with her. And behold, now you have her name in common with the people and have become one of the people and herd with your virtue. You would do better to say, “Inexpressible and nameless is that which gives my soul agony and sweetness and is even the hunger of my entrails.” May your virtue be too exalted for the familiarity of names: and if you must speak of her, then do not be ashamed to stammer of her. Then speak and stammer, “This is my good; this I love; it pleases me wholly; thus alone do I want the good. I do not want it as divine law; I do not want it as human statute and need: it shall not be a signpost for me to overearths and paradises. It is an earthly virtue that I love: there is little prudence in it, and least of all the reason of all men. But this bird built its nest with me: therefore I love and caress it; now it dwells with me, sitting on its golden eggs.” Thus you shall stammer and praise your virtue.

I am a railing by the torrent: let those who can, grasp me! Your crutch, however, I am not. Thus spoke Zarathustra.

True, we love life, not because we are used to living but because we are used to loving. There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness. And to me too, as I am well disposed toward life, butterflies and soap bubbles and whatever among men is of their kind seem to know most about happiness. Seeing these light, foolish, delicate, mobile little souls flutter—that seduces Zarathustra to tears and songs. I would believe only in a god who could dance. And when I saw my devil I found him serious, thorough, profound, and solemn: it was the spirit of gravity—through him all things fall. Not by wrath does one kill but by laughter. Come, let us kill the spirit of gravity! I have learned to walk: ever since, I let myself run. I have learned to fly: ever since, I do not want to be pushed before moving along. Now I am light, now I fly, now I see myself beneath myself, now a god dances through me. Thus spoke Zarathustra.