From Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Portable Nietzsche. Edited and translated by Walter Kaufmann, Penguin Books, 1977.
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 convulsions and raptures of their transport? To their bodies and this earth.
- pg 144-145
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.
- pg 147
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 self wants to go under, and that is why you have become despisers of the body! For you are no longer able to create beyond yourselves.
- pg 147
My brother, are war and battle evil? But this evil is necessary; necessary are the envy and mistrust and calumny among your virtues. Behold how each of your virtues covets what is highest: each wants your whole spirit that it might become her herald; each wants your whole strength in wrath, hatred, and love. Each virtue is jealous of the others, and jealousy is a terrible thing. Virtues too can perish of jealousy. Surrounded by the flame of jealousy, one will in the end, like the scorpion, turn one's poisonous sting against oneself. Alas, my brother, have you never yet seen a virtue deny and stab herself?
Man is something that must be overcome; and therefore you shall love your virtues, for you will perish of them.
Thus spoke Zarathustra.
- pg 149
I no longer feel as you do: this cloud which I see beneath me, this blackness and gravity at which I laugh - this is your thundercloud.
- pg 152
"But by my love and hope I beseech you: do not throw away the hero in your soul! Hold holy your highest hope!"
- pg 156
And you, too, for whom life is furious work and unrest - are you not very weary of life? Are you not very ripe for the preaching of death? All of you to whom furious work is dear, and whatever is fast, new, and strange - you find it hard to bear yourselves; your industry is escape and the will to forget yourselves. If you believed more in life you would fling yourselves less to the moment. But you do not have contents enough in yourselves for waiting - and not even for idleness.
- pg 158
You should love peace as a means to new wars - and the short peace more than the long. To you I do not recommend work but struggle. To you I do not recommend peace but victory. Let your work be a struggle. Let your peace be a victory!
- pg 159
Little do the people comprehend the great - that is, the creating. But they have a mind for all showmen and actors of great things. Around the inventors of new values the world revolves: invisibly it revolves. But around the actors revolve the people and fame: that is "the way of the world."
- pg 164
That which we recognize in a person we also inflame in him: therefore, beware of the small creatures. Before you they feel small, and their baseness glimmers and glows in invisible revenge. Have you not noticed how often they became mute when you stepped among them, and how their strength went from them like smoke from a dying fire?
- pg 166
Once peoples hung a tablet of the good over themselves. Love which would rule and love which would obey have together created such tablets. 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.
Verily, the clever ego, the loveless ego that desires its own profit in the profit of the many - that is not the origin of the herd, but its going under.
- pg 173
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.
- pg 185
Verily, that Hebrew died too early whom the preachers of slow death honor; and for many it has become a calamity that he died too early. As yet he knew only tears and the melancholy of the Hebrew, and hatred of the good and the just - the Hebrew Jesus: then the longing for death overcame him. Would that he had remained in the wilderness and far from the good and the just! Perhaps he would have learned to live and to love the earth - and laughter too.
Believe me, my brothers! He died too early; he himself would have recanted his teaching, had he reached my age. Noble enough was he to recant. But he was not yet mature. Immature is the love of the youth, and immature his hatred of man and earth. His mind and the wings of his spirit are still tied down and heavy.
- pg 185
You say you believe in Zarathustra? But what matters Zarathustra? You are my believers - but what matter all believers? 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.
Verily, my brothers, with different eyes shall I then seek my lost ones; with a different love shall I then love you.
- pg 190
Indeed, a lake is within me, solitary and self-sufficient; but the river of my love carries it along, down to the sea.
- pg 196
But let me reveal my heart to you entirely, my friends: if there were gods, how could I endure not to be a god! Hence there are no gods.
- pg 198
The beauty of the overman came to me as a shadow. O my brothers, what are the gods to me now?
- pg 200
And if a friend does you evil, then say: "I forgive you what you did to me; but that you have done it to yourself - how could I forgive that?" Thus speaks all great love: it overcomes even forgiveness and pity.
- pg 202
Behold these huts which these priests built! Churches they call their sweet-smelling caves. Oh, that falsified light! That musty air! Here the soul is not allowed to soar to its height. For thus their faith commands: "Crawl up the stairs on your knees, ye sinners!"
- pg 203
They have called "God" what was contrary to them and gave them pain; and verily, there was much of the heroic in their adoration. And they did not know how to love their god except by crucifying man.
- pg 204
And some want to be edified and elevated, and they call that virtue, while others want to be bowled over, and they call that virtue too. And thus almost all believe that they have a share in virtue; and at the very least everyone wants to be an expert on good and evil.
- pg 207-208
What was it that happened to me? How did I redeem myself from nausea? Who rejuvenated my sight? How did I fly to the height where no more rabble sits by the well? Was it my nausea itself which created wings for me and water-divining powers? Verily, I had to fly to the highest spheres that I might find the fount of pleasure again.
Oh, I found it, my brothers! Here, in the highest spheres, the fount of pleasure wells up for me! And here is a life of which the rabble does not drink.
You flow for me almost too violently, fountain of pleasure. And often you empty the cup again by wanting to fill it. And I must still learn to approach you more modestly: all too violently my heart still flows toward you - my heart, upon which my summer burns, short, hot, melancholy, overblissful: how my summer-heart craves your coolness!
Gone is the hesitant gloom of my spring! Gone the malice of my snowflakes in June! Summer have I become entirely, and summer noon! A summer in the highest spheres with cold wells and blissful silence: oh, come, my friends, that the silence may become still more blissful!
For this is our height and our home: we live here too high and steep for all the unclean and their thirst. Cast your pure eyes into the well of my pleasure, friends! How should that make it muddy? It shall laugh back at you in its own purity.
On the tree, Future, we build our nest; and in our solitude eagles shall bring us nourishment in their beaks. Verily, no nourishment which the unclean might share: they would think they were devouring fire and they would burn their mouths. Verily, we keep no homes here for the unclean: our pleasure would be an ice cave to their bodies and their spirits.
And we want to live over them like strong winds, neighbors of the eagles, neighbors of the snow, neighbors of the sun: thus live strong winds. And like a wind I yet want to blow among them one day, and with my spirit take the breath of their spirit: thus my future wills it.
Verily, a strong wind is Zarathustra for all who are low; and this counsel he gives to all his enemies and all who spit and spew: "Beware of spitting against the wind!"
Thus spoke Zarathustra.
- pg 211
Thus I speak to you in a parable - you who make souls whirl, you preachers of equality. To me you are tarantulas, and secretly vengeful. But I shall bring your secrets to light; therefore I laugh in your faces with my laughter of the heights. Therefore I tear at your webs, that your rage may lure you out of your lie-holes and your revenge may leap out from behind your word justice. For that man be delivered from revenge, that is for me the bridge to the highest hope, and a rainbow after long storms.
The tarantulas, of course, would have it otherwise.
"What justice means to us is precisely that the world be filled with the storms of our revenge" - thus they speak to each other. "We shall wreak vengeance and abuse on all whose equals we are not" - thus do the tarantula-hearts vow. "And 'will to equality' shall henceforth be the name for virtue; and against all that has power we want to raise our clamor!"
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. Aggrieved conceit, repressed envy - perhaps the conceit and envy of your fathers - erupt from you as a flame and as the frenzy of revenge.
- pg 212
You are no eagles: hence you have never experienced the happiness that is in the terror of the spirit. And he who is not a bird should not build his nest over abysses.
You are lukewarm to me, but all profound knowledge flows cold. Ice cold are the inmost wells of the spirit: refreshing for hot hands and men of action. You stand there honorable and stiff and with straight backs, you famous wise men: no strong wind and will drives you.
Have you never seen a sail go over the sea, rounded and taut and trembling with the violence of the wind? Like the sail, trembling with the violence of the spirit, my wisdom goes over the sea - my wild wisdom.
But you servants of the people, you famous wise men - how could you go with me?
Thus spoke Zarathustra.
- pg 217
But I live in my own light; I drink back into myself the flames that break out of me. I do not know the happiness of those who receive; and I have often dreamed that even stealing must be more blessed than receiving. This is my poverty, that my hand never rests from giving; this is my envy, that I see waiting eyes and the lit-up nights of longing. Oh, wretchedness of all givers! Oh, darkening of my sun! Oh, craving to crave! Oh, ravenous hunger in satiation!
- pg 218
And when I did what was hardest for me and celebrated the triumph of my overcomings, then you made those who loved me scream that I was hurting them most.
- pg 224
And there is nobody from whom I want beauty as much as from you who are powerful: let your kindness be your final self-conquest.
Of all evil I deem you capable: therefore I want the good from you.
Verily, I have often laughed at the weaklings who thought themselves good because they had no claws.
You shall strive after the virtue of the column: it grows more and more beautiful and gentle, but internally harder and more enduring, as it ascends.
Indeed, you that are sublime shall yet become beautiful one day and hold up a mirror to your own beauty.
Then your soul will shudder with godlike desires, and there will be adoration even in your vanity.
For this is the soul's secret: only when the hero has abandoned her, she is approached in a dream by the overhero.
Thus spoke Zarathustra.
- pg 230-231
Alas, where shall I climb now with my longing? From all mountains I look out for fatherlands and motherlands. But home I found nowhere; a fugitive am I in all cities and a departure at all gates. Strange and a mockery to me are the men of today to whom my heart recently drew me; and I am driven out of fatherlands and motherlands. Thus I now love only my children's land, yet undiscovered, in the farthest sea: for this I bid my sails search and search.
- pg 233
"This would be the highest to my mind" - thus says your lying spirit to itself - "to look at life without desire and not, like a dog, with my tongue hanging out. To be happy in looking, with a will that has died and without the grasping and greed of selfishness, the whole body cold and ashen, but with drunken moon eyes. This I should like best" - thus the seduced seduces himself - "to love the earth as the moon loves her, and to touch her beauty only with my eyes. And this is what the immaculate perception of all things shall mean to me: that I want nothing from them, except to be allowed to lie prostrate before them like a mirror with a hundred eyes."
O you sentimental hypocrites, you lechers! You lack innocence in your desire and therefore you slander all desire. Verily, it is not as creators, procreators, and those who have joy in becoming that you love the earth. Where is innocence? Where there is a will to procreate. And he who wants to create beyond himself has the purest will.
Where is beauty? Where I must will with all my will; where I want to love and perish that an image may not remain a mere image. Loving and perishing: that has rhymed for eternities. The will to love, that is to be willing also to die. Thus I speak to you cowards!
- pg 234 - 235
For this is the truth: I have moved from the house of the scholars and I even banged the door behind me. My soul sat hungry at their table too long; I am not, like them, trained to pursue knowledge as if it were nutcracking. I love freedom and the air over the fresh earth; rather would I sleep on ox hides than on their decorums and respectabilities.
I am too hot and burned by my own thoughts; often it nearly takes my breath away. Then I must go out into the open and away from all dusty rooms. But they sit cool in the cool shade: in everything they want to be mere spectators, and they beware of sitting where the sun burns on the steps. Like those who stand in the street and gape at the people who pass by, they too wait and gape at thoughts that others have thought.
- pg 236 - 237
This, however, is the second instance of my human prudence: I spare the vain more than the proud. Is not hurt vanity the mother of all tragedies? But where pride is hurt, there something better than pride is likely to grow.
That life may be good to look at, its play must be well acted; but for that good actors are needed. All the vain are good actors: they act and they want people to enjoy looking at them; all their spirit is behind this will. They enact themselves, they invent themselves; near them I love to look at life: that cures my melancholy. Therefore I spare the vain, for they are the physicians of my melancholy and keep me attached to life as to a play.
And then: who could fathom the full depth of the modesty of the vain man? I am well disposed to him and I pity his modesty. It is from you that he wants to acquire his faith in himself; he nourishes himself on your glances, he eats your praise out of your hands. He even believes your lies if you lie well about him; for, at bottom, his heart sighs: what am I? And if the true virtue is the one that is unaware of itself - well, the vain man is unaware of his modesty.
- pg 255
"It is the stillest words that bring on the storm. Thoughts that come on doves' feet guide the world."
- pg 258
The time is gone when mere accidents could still happen to me; and what could still come to me now that was not mine already?
- pg 264
And if you now lack all ladders, then you must know how to climb on your own head: how else would you want to climb upward?
- pg 265
And where does man not stand at the edge of abysses? Is not seeing always - seeing abysses?
- pg 269
Where the storms plunge down into the sea and the mountain stretches out its trunk for water, there everyone shall once have his day and night watches for his testing and knowledge. He shall be known and tested, whether he is of my kind and kin, whether he is the master of a long will, taciturn even when he speaks, and yielding so that in giving he receives - so that he may one day become my companion and a fellow creator and fellow celebrant of Zarathustra - one who writes my will on my tablets to contribute to the greater perfection of all things. And for his sake and the sake of those like him I must perfect myself; therefore I now evade my happiness and offer myself to all unhappiness, for my final testing and knowledge.
- pg 273 - 274
Rather would I sit in a barrel under closed heavens, rather sit in the abyss without a heaven, than see you, bright heaven, stained by drifting clouds.
- pg 277
"By Chance" - that is the most ancient nobility of the world, and this I restored to all things: I delivered them from their bondage under Purpose. This freedom and heavenly cheer I have placed over all things like an azure bell when I taught that over them and through them no "eternal will" wills. This prankish folly I have put in the place of that will when I taught: "In everything one thing is impossible: rationality."
- pg 278
And woe, if the first lord is merely the first servant!
- pg 281
At bottom, these simpletons want a single thing most of all: that nobody should hurt them. Thus they try to please and gratify everybody. This, however, is cowardice, even if it be called virtue.
- pg 282
But why do I speak where nobody has my ears? And so let me shout it into all the winds: You are becoming smaller and smaller, you small people! You are crumbling, you comfortable ones. You will yet perish of your many small virtues, of your many small abstentions, of your many small resignations. Too considerate, too yielding is your soil. But that a tree may become great it must strike hard roots around hard rocks.
- pg 283
These smoky, room-temperature, used-up, wilted, fretful souls - how could their grudge endure my happiness?
- pg 286
Alas, there are always only a few whose hearts long retain their courageous bearing and overbearing prankishness, and whose spirits also remain patient. The rest, however, are cowards. The rest - those are always by far the most, the commonplace, the superfluous, the all-too-many: all these are cowards.
- pg 291
Or they spend long evenings watching a cunning, ambushing, cross-marked spider, which preaches cleverness to the other spiders and teaches thus: "Under crosses one can spin well."
- pg 293
And I still reminded myself, "Everything small is innocent of its smallness."
- pg 310
"This is my way; where is yours?" - thus I answered those who asked me "the way." For the way - that does not exist.
- pg 319
There is an old illusion, which is called good and evil. So far the wheel of this illusion has revolved around soothsayers and stargazers. Once man believed in soothsayers and stargazers, and therefore believed: "All is destiny: you ought to, for you must."
Then man again mistrusted all soothsayers and stargazers, and therefore believed: "All is freedom: you can, for you will."
O my brothers, so far there have been only illusions about stars and the future, not knowledge; and therefore there have been only illusions so far, not knowledge, about good and evil.
- pg 313-314
O my brothers, your nobility should not look backward but ahead! Exiles shall you be from all father- and forefather-lands! Your children's land shall you love: this love shall be your new nobility - the undiscovered land in the most distant sea. For that I bid your sails search and search.
In your children you shall make up for being the children of your fathers: thus shall you redeem all that is past. This new tablet I place over you.
- pg 315 - 316
And there is such a variety of well-invented things that the earth is like the breasts of a woman: useful as well as pleasing.
- pg 319
When the great man screams, the small man comes running with his tongue hanging from lasciviousness. But he calls it his 'pity.'
- pg 330
My torture was not the knowledge that man is evil - but I cried as no one has yet cried: 'Alas, that his greatest evil is so very small! Alas, that his best is so very small!'
- pg 331
What Nietzsche envisages is the creator for whom all negation is merely incidental to his great affirmation: joyous spirits, "laughing lions."
- pg 346
For that is what I am through and through: reeling, reeling in, raising up, raising, a raiser, cultivator, and disciplinarian, who once counseled himself, not for nothing: Become who you are!
- pg 351
Man's fate knows no harsher misfortune than when those who have power on earth are not also the first men.
- pg 358
"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."
- pg 369
Whoever praises him as a god of love does not have a high enough opinion of love itself. Did this god not want to be a judge too? But the lover loves beyond reward and retribution.
- pg 373
Rather no god, rather make destiny on one's own, rather be a fool, rather be a god oneself!
- pg 374
Man, however, is something that must be overcome.
- pg 379
"Especially today," answered the voluntary beggar; "today, I mean, when everything base has become rebellious and shy and, in its own way, arrogant - I mean, in the way of the mob. For the hour has come, you know it, for the great, bad, long, slow revolt of the mob and slaves: it grows and grows. Now the base are outraged by any charity and any little giving away; and the overrich should beware. Whoever drips today, like bulging bottles out of all-too-narrow necks - such bottles they like to seize today to break their necks. Lascivious greed, galled envy, aggrieved vengefulness, mob pride: all that leaped into my face. It is no longer true that the poor are blessed. But the kingdom of heaven is among the cows."
"And why is it not among the rich?" asked Zarathustra temptingly as he warded off the cows, which were breathing trustingly on the peaceful man. "Why do you tempt me?" he replied. "You yourself know it even better than I. What was it after all that drove me to the poorest, O Zarathustra? Was it not that I was nauseated by our richest men? By the convicts of riches, who pick up their advantage out of any rubbish, with cold eyes, lewd thoughts; by this rabble that stinks to high heaven; by this gilded, false mob whose fathers have been pickpockets or carrion birds or ragpickers - with women, obliging, lascivious, and forgetful: for none of them is too far from the whores - mob above and mob below! What do 'poor' and 'rich' matter today? This difference I have forgotten. I fled, farther, ever farther, till I came to these cows."
- pg 382
Beware lest a narrow faith imprison you in the end - some harsh and severe illusion. For whatever is narrow and solid seduces and tempts you now.
- pg 387
Precisely the least, the softest, lightest, a lizard's rustling, a breath, a breeze, a moment's glance - it is little that makes the best happiness.
- pg 389
"Nothing more delightful grows on earth, O Zarathustra, than a lofty, strong will: that is the earth's most beautiful plant. A whole landscape is refreshed by one such tree. Whoever grows up high like you, O Zarathustra, I compare to the pine: long, silent, hard, alone, of the best and most resilient wood, magnificent - and in the end reaching out with strong green branches for his own dominion, questioning wind and weather and whatever else is at home on the heights with forceful questions, and answering yet more forcefully, a commander, triumphant: oh, who would not climb high mountains to see such plants? Your tree here, O Zarathustra, refreshes even the gloomy ones, the failures; your sight reassures and heals the heart even of the restless. And verily, toward your mountain and tree many eyes are directed today; a great longing has arisen, and many have learned to ask, 'Who is Zarathustra?'"
- pg 392-393
"O my strange guests! Have you not yet heard anything of my children? And that they are on their way to me? Speak to me of my gardens, of my blessed isles, of my new beauty - why do you not speak to me of that? This present I beseech from your love, that you speak to me of my children. For this I am rich, for this I grew poor; what did I not give, what would I not give to have one thing: these children, this living plantation, these life-trees of my will and my highest hope!"
- pg 395
Will nothing beyond your capacity: there is a wicked falseness among those who will beyond their capacity. Especially if they will great things! For they arouse mistrust against great things, these subtle counterfeiters and actors - until finally they are false before themselves, squinters, whited worm-eaten decay, cloaked with strong words, with display-virtues, with splendid false deeds.
- pg 401
If you would go high, use your own legs. Do not let yourselves be carried up; do not sit on the backs and heads of others. But you mounted a horse? You are now riding quickly up to your goal? All right, my friend! But your lame foot is sitting on the horse too. When you reach your goal, when you jump off your horse - on your very height, you higher man, you will stumble.
- pg 414
Joy, however, does not want heirs, or children - joy wants itself, wants eternity, wants recurrence, wants everything eternally the same.
- pg 446