The Portable Nietzsche

by Friedrich Nietzsche

You look up when you feel the need for elevation. And I look down because I am elevated.

My brothers in war, I love you thoroughly; I am and I was of your kind. And I am also your best enemy. So let me tell you the truth!

Somewhere there are still peoples and herds, but not where we live, my brothers: here there are states. State? What is that?

State is the name of the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly it tells lies too; and this lie crawls out of its mouth: “I, the state, am the people.” That is a lie!

All-too-many are born: for the superfluous the state was invented.

State I call it where all drink poison, the good and the wicked; state, where all lose themselves, the good and the wicked; state, where the slow suicide of all is called “life.” Behold the superfluous! They steal the works of the inventors and the treasures of the sages for themselves; “education” they call their theft—and everything turns to sickness and misfortune for them. Behold the superfluous! They are always sick; they vomit their gall and call it a newspaper. They devour each other and cannot even digest themselves. Behold the superfluous ! They gather riches and become poorer with them. They want power and first the lever of power, much money—the impotent paupers! Watch them clamber, these swift monkeys! They clamber over one another and thus drag one another into the mud and the depth. They all want to get to the throne: that is their madness—as if happiness sat on the throne. Often mud sits on the throne—and often also the throne on mud. Mad they all appear to me, clambering monkeys and overardent. Foul smells their idol, the cold monster: foul they smell to me altogether, these idolators.

Verily, whoever possesses little is possessed that much less: praised be a little poverty!

Far from the market place and from fame happens all that is great: far from the market place and from fame the inventors of new values have always dwelt. Flee, my friend, into your solitude: I see you stung all over by poisonous flies. Flee where the air is raw and strong. Flee into your solitude! You have lived too close to the small and the miserable.

No longer raise up your arm against them. Numberless are they, and it is not your lot to shoo flies.

Flee, my friend, into your solitude and where the air is raw and strong! It is not your lot to shoo flies.

“There is always one too many around me”—thus thinks the hermit.

Zarathustra saw many lands and many peoples: thus he discovered the good and evil of many peoples.

Me too Zarathustra, I was they to all of them, and they never wanted any part of me unless I became a part of them. It is the same everywhere. I am me. They are them.

First, peoples were creators; and only in later times, individuals. Verily, the individual himself is still the most recent creation.

The delight in the herd is more ancient than the delight in the ego; and as long as the good conscience is identified with the herd, only the bad conscience says: I.

You invite a witness when you want to speak well of yourselves; and when you have seduced him to think well of you, then you think well of yourselves.

Validation in other

Not only are they liars who speak when they know better, but even more those who speak when they know nothing.

I do not love your festivals either: I found too many actors there, and the spectators, too, often behaved like actors.

But the worst enemy you can encounter will always be you, yourself; you lie in wait for yourself in caves and woods.

It is nobler to declare oneself wrong than to insist on being right—especially when one is right.

Are you a man entitled to wish for a child? Are you the victorious one, the self-conqueror, the commander of your senses, the master of your virtues? This I ask you. Or is it the animal and need that speak out of your wish? Or loneliness? Or lack of peace with yourself? Let your victory and your freedom long for a child. You shall build living monuments to your victory and your liberation. You shall build over and beyond yourself, but first you must be built yourself, perpendicular in body and soul. You shall not only reproduce yourself, but produce something higher.

Many die too late, and a few die too early. The doctrine still sounds strange: “Die at the right time!”

The man of knowledge must not only love his enemies, he must also be able to hate his friends.

One repays a teacher badly if one always remains nothing but a pupil.

You had not yet sought yourselves: and you found me. Thus do all believers; therefore all faith amounts to so little.

Now I bid you lose me and find yourselves; and only when you have all denied me will I return to you.

‟Dead are all gods: now we want the overman to live”—on that great noon, let this be our last will.

Alas, I often grew weary of the spirit when I found that even the rabble had esprit. And I turned my back on those who rule when I saw what they now call ruling: higgling and haggling for power—with the rabble. I have lived with closed ears among people with foreign tongues: would that the tongue of their higgling and their haggling for power might remain foreign to me.

You preachers of equality, the tyrannomania of impotence clamors thus out of you for equality: your most secret ambitions to be tyrants thus shroud themselves in words of virtue.

Mistrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful. They are people of a low sort and stock; the hangman and the bloodhound look out of their faces. Mistrust all who talk much of their justice! Verily, their souls lack more than honey. And when they call themselves the good and the just, do not forget that they would be pharisees, if only they had—power.

I do not wish to be mixed up and confused with these preachers of equality. For, to me justice speaks thus: “Men are not equal.” Nor shall they become equal! What would my love of the overman be if I spoke otherwise?

"We hold these truths to be self evident that all men are created equal" is the opposite of self evident. People are born in very unequal situations in everyway. It doesn't sound nice, but more true than our comforting fantasy

the free spirit, the enemy of fetters, the nonadorer who dwells in the woods, is as hateful to the people as a wolf to dogs.

Whatever lives, obeys. And this is the second point: he who cannot obey himself is commanded. That is the nature of the living.

This, however, is the third point that I heard: that commanding is harder than obeying; and not only because he who commands must carry the burden of all who obey, and because this burden may easily crush him.

“I am that which must always overcome itself.

It was long ago that I experienced the reasons for my opinions. Would I not have to be a barrel of memory if I wanted to carry my reasons around with me? It is already too much for me to remember my own opinions; and many a bird flies away.

One must learn to love oneself—thus I teach—with a wholesome and healthy love, so that one can bear to be with oneself and need not roam.

“Yes, life is a grave burden.” But only man is a grave burden for himself! That is because he carries on his shoulders too much that is alien to him. Like a camel, he kneels down and lets himself be well loaded. Especially the strong, reverent spirit that would bear much: he loads too many alien grave words and values on himself, and then life seems a desert to him. And verily, much that is our own is also a grave burden! And much that is inside man is like an oyster: nauseating and slippery and hard to grasp,

Man is hard to discover—hardest of all for himself:

By many ways, in many ways, I reached my truth: it was not on one ladder that I climbed to the height where my eye roams over my distance. And it was only reluctantly that I ever inquired about the way: that always offended my taste. I preferred to question and try out the ways themselves. A trying and questioning was my every move; and verily, one must also learn to answer such questioning. That, however, is my taste—not good, not bad, but my taste of which I am no longer ashamed and which I have no wish to hide. “This is my way; where is yours?”—thus I answered those who asked me “the way.” For the way—that does not exist.

There it was too that I picked up the word “overman” by the way, and that man is something that must be overcome—that man is a bridge and no end:

Good men never speak the truth;

This is my pity for all that is past: I see how all of it is abandoned—abandoned to the pleasure, the spirit, the madness of every generation, which comes along and reinterprets all that has been as a bridge to itself.

There is much filth in the world; that much is true. But that does not make the world itself a filthy monster.

Go your own ways! And let the people and peoples go theirs—dark

O my brothers, one man once saw into the hearts of the good and the just and said, “They are the pharisees.” But he was not understood. The good and the just themselves were not permitted to understand him: their spirit is imprisoned in their good conscience. The stupidity of the good is unfathomably shrewd. This, however, is the truth: the good must be pharisees—they have no choice. The good must crucify him who invents his own virtue. That is the truth!

“Why so hard?” the kitchen coal once said to the diamond. “After all, are we not close kin?” Why so soft? O my brothers, thus I ask you: are you not after all my brothers?

Zarathustra, the godless, summons you! I, Zarathustra, the advocate of life, the advocate of suffering, the advocate of the circle; I summon you, my most abysmal thought!

“To every soul there belongs another world; for every soul, every other soul is an afterworld.

“O Zarathustra,” the animals said, “to those who think as we do, all things themselves are dancing: they come and offer their hands and laugh and flee—and come back. Everything goes, everything comes back; eternally rolls the wheel of being. Everything dies, everything blossoms again; eternally runs the year of being. Everything breaks, everything is joined anew; eternally the same house of being is built. Everything parts, everything greets every other thing again; eternally the ring of being remains faithful to itself. In every Now, being begins; round every Here rolls the sphere There. The center is everywhere. Bent is the path of eternity.ʺ

“Behold, we know what you teach: that all things recur eternally, and we ourselves too; and that we have already existed an eternal number of times, and all things with us. You teach that there is a great year of becoming, a monster of a great year, which must, like an hourglass, turn over again and again so that it may run down and run out again; and all these years are alike in what is greatest as in what is smallest; and we ourselves are alike in every great year, in what is greatest as in what is smallest.