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‘Now I die and vanish,’ you would say, ‘and all at once I am nothing. The soul is as mortal as the body. But the knot of causes in which I am entangled recurs and will create me again. I myself belong to the causes of the eternal recurrence. I come again, with this sun, with this earth, with this eagle, with this serpent—not to a new life or a better life or a similar life: I come back eternally to this same, selfsame life, in what is greatest as in what is smallest, to teach again the eternal recurrence of all things, to speak again the word of the great noon of earth and man, to proclaim the
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“Good manners?” the other king retorted angrily and bitterly; “then what is it that we are trying to get away from? Is it not ‘good manners’? Our ‘good society’? It is indeed better to live among hermits and goatherds than among our gilded, false, painted mob—even if they call themselves ‘good society,’ even if they call themselves ‘nobility.’ They are false and foul through and through, beginning with the blood, thanks to bad old diseases and worse quacks. Best and dearest to me today is a healthy peasant, coarse, cunning, stubborn, enduring: that is the noblest species today. The peasant is
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“This nausea suffocates me: we kings ourselves have become false, overhung and disguised with ancient yellowed grandfathers’ pomp, showpieces for the most stupid and clever and anyone who haggles for power today. We are not the first and yet must represent them: it is this deception that has come to disgust and nauseate us. We have tried to get away from the rabble, all these scream-throats and scribbling bluebottles, the shopkeepers’ stench, the ambitious wriggling, the foul breath—phew for living among the rabble! Phew for representing the first among the rabble! Nausea! Nausea! Nausea! What
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“Rather know nothing than half-know much! Rather be a fool on one’s own than a sage according to the opinion of others!
“The conscience of my spirit demands of me that I know one thing and nothing else: I loathe all the half in spirit, all the vaporous that hover and rave.
“Stop it, you actor! You counterfeiter! You liar from the bottom! I recognize you well!
And verily, you have seen through me very well. But you too have given me no small sample of yourself to try out: you are hard, wise Zarathustra. Hard do you hit with your ‘truths’; your stick forces this truth out of me.”
“Don’t flatter!” replied Zarathustra, still excited and angry, “you actor from the bottom! You are false; why do you talk of truth? You peacock of peacocks,
O Zarathustra, before you saw through my art and lie. You believed in my distress
Not a word of yours is genuine any more, except your mouth—namely, the nausea that sticks to your mouth.”
“Who may speak thus to me, the greatest man alive today?”
“O Zarathustra, I am weary of it; my art nauseates me; I am not great—why do I dissemble? But you know it too: I sought greatness. I wanted to represent a great human being and I persuaded many; but this lie went beyond my strength. It is breaking me. O Zarathustra, everything about me is a lie; but that I am breaking—this, my breaking, is genuine.”
I myself, to be sure—I have not yet seen a great human being. For what is great, even the eyes of the subtlest today are too coarse. It is the realm of the mob. Many have I seen, swollen and straining, and the people cried, ‘Behold a great man!’ But what good are all bellows? In the end, the wind comes out. In the end, a frog which has puffed itself up too long will burst: the wind comes out. To stab a swollen man in the belly, I call that a fine pastime. Hear it well, little boys!
“Today belongs to the mob: who could still know what is great and what small? Who could still successfully seek greatness? Only a fool: fools succeed.
