Thus Spoke Zarathustra (12 page)

Truly, the cunning, loveless Ego, that seeks its advantage in the advantage of many – that is not the origin of the herd, but the herd’s destruction.

It has always been creators and loving men who created good and evil. Fire of love and fire of anger glow in the names of all virtues.

Zarathustra has seen many lands and many peoples: Zarathustra has found no greater power on earth than the works of these loving men: these works are named ‘good’ and’ evil’.

Truly, the power of this praising and blaming is a monster. Tell me, who will subdue it for me, brothers? Tell me, who will fasten fetters upon the thousand necks of this beast?

Hitherto there have been a thousand goals, for there have been a thousand peoples. Only fetters are still lacking for these thousand necks, the one goal is still lacking.

Yet tell me, my brothers: if a goal for humanity is still lacking, is there not still lacking – humanity itself?

Thus spoke Zarathustra.

Of Love of One’s Neighbour

Y
OU
crowd together with your neighbours and have beautiful words for it. But I tell you: Your love of your neighbour is your bad love of yourselves.

You flee to your neighbour away from yourselves and would like to make a virtue of it: but I see through your ‘selflessness’.

The ‘You’ is older than the ‘I’; the ‘You’ has been consecrated, but not yet the ‘I’: so man crowds towards his neighbour.

Do I exhort you to love of your neighbour? I exhort you rather to flight from your neighbour and to love of the most distant!
¹¹

Higher than love of one’s neighbour stands love of the most distant man and of the man of the future; higher still than love of man! account love of causes and of phantoms.

This phantom that runs along behind you, my brother, is fairer than you; why do you not give it your flesh and bones? But you are afraid and you run to your neighbour.

You cannot endure to be alone with yourselves and do not love yourselves enough: now you want to mislead your neighbour into love and gild yourselves with his mistake.

I wish rather that you could not endure to be with any kind of neighbour or with your neighbour’s neighbour; then you would have to create your friend and his overflowing heart out of yourselves.

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

It is not only he who speaks contrary to what he knows who lies, but even more he who speaks contrary to what he does not know. And thus you speak of yourselves in your dealings with others and deceive your neighbour with yourselves.

Thus speaks the fool: ‘Mixing with people ruins the character, especially when one has none.’

One man runs to his neighbour because he is looking for himself, and another because he wants to lose himself. Your bad love of yourselves makes solitude a prison to you.

It is the distant man who pays for your love of your neighbour; and when there are five of you together, a sixth always has to die.

I do not like your festivals, either: I have found too many actors there, and the audience, too, behaved like actors.

I do not teach you the neighbour but the friend. May the friend be to you a festival of the earth and a foretaste of the Superman.

I teach you the friend and his overflowing heart. But you must understand how to be a sponge if you want to be loved by overflowing hearts.

I teach you the friend in whom the world stands complete, a vessel of the good – the creative friend, who always has a complete world to bestow.

And as the world once dispersed for him, so it comes back to him again, as the evolution of good through evil, as the evolution of design from chance.

May the future and the most distant be the principle of your today: in your friend you should love the Superman as your principle.

My brothers, I do not exhort you to love of your neighbour: I exhort you to love of the most distant.

Thus spoke Zarathustra.

Of the Way of the Creator

M
Y
brother, do you want to go apart and be alone? Do you want to seek the way to yourself? Pause just a moment and listen to me.

‘He who seeks may easily get lost himself. It is a crime to go apart and be alone’ – thus speaks the herd.

The voice of the herd will still ring within you. And when you say: ‘We have no longer the same conscience, you and I’, it will be a lament and a grief.

For see, it is still this same conscience that causes your grief: and the last glimmer of this conscience still glows in your affliction.

But you want to go the way of your affliction, which is the way to yourself? If so, show me your strength for it and your right to it!

Are you a new strength and a new right? A first motion? A self-propelling wheel? Can you also compel stars to revolve about you?

Alas, there is so much lusting for eminence! There is so
much convulsion of the ambitious! Show me that you are not one of the lustful or ambitious!

Alas, there are so many great ideas that do no more than a bellows: they inflate and make emptier.

Do you call yourself free? I want to hear your ruling idea, and not that you have escaped from a yoke.

Are you such a man as
ought
to escape a yoke? There are many who threw off their final worth when they threw off their bondage.

Free from what? Zarathustra does not care about that! But your eye should clearly tell me: free
for
what?

Can you furnish yourself with your own good and evil and hang up your own will above yourself as a law? Can you be judge of yourself and avenger of your law?

It is terrible to be alone with the judge and avenger of one’s own law. It is to be like a star thrown forth into empty space and into the icy breath of solitude.

Today you still suffer from the many, O man set apart: today you still have your courage whole and your hopes.

But one day solitude will make you weary, one day your pride will bend and your courage break. One day you will cry: ‘I am alone!’

One day you will no longer see what is exalted in you; and what is base in you, you will see all too closely; your sublimity itself will make you afraid, as if it were a phantom. One day you will cry: ‘Everything is false!’

There are emotions that seek to kill the solitary; if they do not succeed, well, they must die themselves! But are you capable of being a murderer?

My brother, have you ever known the word ‘contempt’? And the anguish of your justice in being just to those who despise you?

You compel many to change their opinion about you; they hold that very much against you. You approached them and yet went on past them: that they will never forgive you.

You go above and beyond them: but the higher you climb, the smaller you appear to the eye of envy. And he who flies is hated most of all.

‘How could you be just towards me?’ – that is how you must speak – ‘I choose your injustice as my portion.’

They throw injustice and dirt at the solitary: but, my brother, if you want to be a star, you must shine none the less brightly for them on that account!

And be on your guard against the good and just! They would like to crucify those who devise their own virtue -they hate the solitary.

Be on your guard, too, against holy simplicity! Everything which is not simple is unholy to it: and it, too, likes to play, with fire – in this case, the fire of the stake.

And be on your guard, too, against the assaults your love makes upon you! The solitary extends his hand too quickly to anyone he meets.

To many men, you ought not to give your hand, but only your paw
¹²
: and I should like it if your paw had claws, too.

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

Solitary man, you are going the way to yourself! And your way leads past yourself and your seven devils!

You will be a heretic to yourself and a witch and a prophet and an evil-doer and a villain.

You must be ready to burn yourself in your own flame: how could you become new, if you had not first become ashes?

Solitary man, you are going the way of the creator: you want to create yourself a god from your seven devils!

Solitary man, you are going the way of the lover: you love yourself and for that reason you despise yourself as only lovers can despise.

The lover wants to create, because he despises! What does he know of love who has not had to despise precisely what he loved?

Go apart and be alone with your love and your creating, my brother; and justice will be slow to limp after you.

Go apart and be alone with my tears, my brother. I love
him who wants to create beyond himself, and thus perishes.

Thus spoke Zarathustra.

Of Old and Young Women

‘W
HY
do you slink so shyly through the twilight, Zarathustra? And what are you hiding so carefully under your cloak?

‘Is it a treasure someone has given you? Or a child that has been born to you? Or are you now taking the way of thieves yourself, friend of the wicked?’

Truly, my brother! (said Zarathustra) it is a treasure that has been given me: it is a little truth that I carry.

But it is as unruly as a little child, and if I do not stop its mouth it will cry too loudly.

Today as I was going my way alone, at the hour when the sun sets, a little old woman encountered me and spoke thus to my soul:

‘Zarathustra has spoken much to us women, too, but he has never spoken to us about woman.’

And I answered her: ‘One should speak about women only to men.’

‘Speak to me too of woman,’ she said; ‘I am old enough soon to forget it.’

And I obliged the little old woman and spoke to her thus:

Everything about woman is a riddle, and everything about woman has one solution: it is called pregnancy.

For the woman, the man is a means: the end is always the child. But what is the woman for the man?

The true man wants two things: danger and play. For that reason he wants woman, as the most dangerous plaything.

Man should be trained for war and woman for the recreation of the warrior: all else is folly.

The warrior does not like fruit that is too sweet. Therefore he likes woman; even the sweetest woman is still bitter.

Woman understands children better than a man, but man is more childlike than woman.

A child is concealed in the true man: it wants to play. Come, women, discover the child in man!

Let woman be a plaything, pure and fine like a precious stone illumined by the virtues of a world that does not yet exist.

Let the flash of a star glitter in your level Let your hope be: ‘May I bear the Superman!’

Let there be bravery in your love! With your love you should attack him who inspires you with fear.

Let your honour be in your love! Woman has understood little otherwise about honour. But let this be your honour: always to love more than you are loved and never to be second in this.

Let man fear woman when she loves. Then she bears every sacrifice and every other thing she accounts valueless.

Let man fear woman when she hates: for man is at the bottom of his soul only wicked, but woman is base.

Whom does woman hate most? – Thus spoke the iron to the magnet: ‘I hate you most, because you attract me, but are not strong enough to draw me towards you.’

The man’s happiness is: I will. The woman’s happiness is: He will.

‘Behold, now the world has become perfect!’ – thus thinks every woman when she obeys with all her love.

And woman has to obey and find a depth for her surface. Woman’s nature is surface, a changeable, stormy film upon shallow waters.

But a man’s nature is deep, its torrent roars in subterranean caves: woman senses its power but does not comprehend it.

Then the little old woman answered me: ‘Zarathustra has said many nice things, especially for those who are young enough for them.

‘It is strange, Zarathustra knows little of women and yet he is right about them! Is this because with women nothing is impossible?

‘And now accept as thanks a little truth 11 am certainly old enough for it!

‘Wrap it up and stop its mouth: otherwise it will cry too loudly, this little truth!’

‘Give me your little truth, woman!’ I said. And thus spoke the little old woman:

‘Are you visiting women? Do not forget your whip!’

Thus spoke Zarathustra.

Of the Adder’s Bite

O
NE
day Zarathustra had fallen asleep under a fig tree because of the heat, and had laid his arms over his face. An adder came along and bit him in the neck, so that Zarathustra cried out with pain. When he had taken his arm from his face he regarded the snake: it recognized Zarathustra’s eyes, turned away awkwardly and was about to go. ‘No, don’t go,’ said Zarathustra; ‘you have not yet received my thanks! You have awakened me at the right time, I still have a long way to go.’ ‘You have only a short way to go,’ said the adder sadly, ‘my poison is deadly.’ Zarathustra smiled. ‘When did a dragon ever die from the poison of a snake?’ he said. ‘But take your poison back! You are not rich enough to give it me!’ Then the adder fell upon his neck again and licked his wound.

When Zarathustra once told this to his disciples, they asked: ‘And what, O Zarathustra, is the moral of your story?’ Zarathustra answered the question thus:

The good and just call me the destroyer of morals: my story is immoral.

When, however, you have an enemy, do not requite him good for evil: for that would make him ashamed. But prove that he has done something good to you.

Better to be angry than make ashamed! And when you are cursed, I do not like it that you then want to bless. Rather curse back a little!

And should a great injustice be done you, then quickly do five little injustices besides. He who bears injustice alone is terrible to behold.