Thus Spoke Zarathustra (11 page)

The world revolves about the inventor of new values: imperceptibly it revolves. But the people and the glory revolve around the actor: that is ‘the way of the world’.

The actor possesses spirit but little conscience of the spirit.
⁸
He always believes in that with which he most powerfully produces belief – produces belief in
himself
!

Tomorrow he will have a new faith and the day after tomorrow a newer one. He has a quick perception, as the people have, and a capricious temperament.

To overthrow – to him that means: to prove. To drive frantic – to him that means: to convince. And blood is to him the best of all arguments.

A truth that penetrates only sensitive ears he calls a lie and a thing of nothing. Truly, he believes only in gods who make a great noise in the world!

The market-place is full of solemn buffoons – and the people boast of their great men! These are their heroes of the hour.

But the hour presses them: so they press you. And from you too they require a Yes or a No. And woe to you if you want to set your chair between For and Against.

Do not be jealous, lover of truth, because of these inflexible and oppressive men! Truth has never yet clung to the arm of an inflexible man.

Return to your security because of these abrupt men: only in the market-place is one assailed with Yes? or No?

The experience of all deep wells is slow: they must wait long until they know
what
has fallen into their depths.

All great things occur away from glory and the marketplace: the inventors of new values have always lived away from glory and the market-place.

Flee, my friend, into your solitude: I see you stung by poisonous flies. Flee to where the raw, rough breeze blows!

Flee into your solitude! You have lived too near the small and the pitiable men. Flee from their hidden vengeance! Towards you they are nothing but vengeance.

No longer lift your arm against them! They are innumerable and it is not your fate to be a fly-swat.

Innumerable are these small and pitiable men; and raindrops and weeds have already brought about the destruction of many a proud building.

You are no stone, but already these many drops have made you hollow. You will yet break and burst apart through these many drops.

I see you wearied by poisonous flies, I see you bloodily torn in a hundred places; and your pride refuses even to be angry.

They want blood from you in all innocence, their bloodless souls thirst for blood – and therefore they sting in all innocence.

But you, profound man, you suffer too profoundly even from small wounds; and before you have recovered, the same poison-worm is again crawling over your hand.

You are too proud to kill these sweet-toothed creatures.

But take care that it does not become your fate to bear all their poisonous injustice!

They buzz around you even with their praise: and their praise is importunity. They want to be near your skin and your blood.

They flatter you as if you were a god or a devil; they whine before you as before a god or a devil. What of it! They are flatterers and whiners, and nothing more.

And they are often kind to you. But that has always been the prudence of the cowardly. Yes, the cowardly are prudent!

They think about you a great deal with their narrow souls -you are always suspicious to them. Everything that is thought about a great deal is finally thought suspicious.
⁹

They punish you for all your virtues. Fundamentally they forgive you only – your mistakes.

Because you are gentle and just-minded, you say: ‘They are not to be blamed for their little existence.’ But their little souls think: ‘All great existence is blameworthy.’

Even when you are gentle towards them, they still feel you despise them; and they return your kindness with secret unkindness.

Your silent pride always offends their taste; they rejoice if you are ever modest enough to be vain.

When we recognize a peculiarity in a man we also inflame that peculiarity. So guard yourself against the small men!

Before you, they feel themselves small, and their baseness glimmers and glows against you in hidden vengeance.

Have you not noticed how often they became silent when you approached them, and how their strength left them like smoke from a dying fire?

Yes, my friend, you are a bad conscience to your neighbours: for they are unworthy of you. Thus they hate you and would dearly like to suck your blood.

Your neighbours will always be poisonous flies: that about you which is great, that itself must make them more poisonous and ever more fly-like.

Flee, my friend, into your solitude and to where the raw, rough breeze blows! It is not your fate to be a fly-swat.

Thus spoke Zarathustra.

Of Chastity

I
LOVE
the forest. It is bad to live in towns: too many of the lustful live there.

Is it not better to fall into the hands of a murderer than into the dreams of a lustful woman?

And just look at these men: their eye reveals it – they know of nothing better on earth than to lie with a woman.

There is filth at the bottom of their souls; and it is worse if this filth still has something of the spirit in it!

If only you had become perfect at least as animals! But to animals belongs innocence.

Do I exhort you to kill your senses? I exhort you to an innocence of the senses.

Do I exhort you to chastity? With some, chastity is a virtue, but with many it is almost a vice.

These people abstain, it is true: but the bitch Sensuality glares enviously out of all they do.

This restless beast follows them even into the heights of their virtue and the depths of their cold spirit.

And how nicely the bitch Sensuality knows how to beg for a piece of spirit, when a piece of flesh is denied her.

Do you love tragedies and all that is heartbreaking? But I mistrust your bitch Sensuality.

Your eyes are too cruel for me; you look upon sufferers lustfully. Has your lasciviousness not merely disguised itself and called itself pity?

And I offer you this parable: Not a few who sought to drive out their devil entered into the swine themselves.

Those to whom chastity is difficult should be dissuaded from it, lest it become the way to Hell – that is, to filth and lust of the soul.

Am I speaking of dirty things? That does not seem to me the worst I could do.

Not when truth is dirty, but when it is shallow, does the enlightened man dislike to wade into its waters.

Truly, there are those who are chaste from the very heart: they are more gentle of heart and they laugh more often and more heartily than you.

They laugh at chastity too, and ask: ‘What is chastity?

‘Is chastity not folly? But this folly came to us and not we to it.

‘We offered this guest love and shelter: now it lives with us – let it stay as long as it wishes!’

Thus spoke Zarathustra.

Of the Friend

‘O
NE
is always one too many around me’ – thus speaks the hermit. ‘Always once one – in the long run that makes two!’

I and Me are always too earnestly in conversation with one another: how could it be endured, if there were not a friend?

For the hermit the friend is always the third person: the third person is the cork that prevents the conversation of the other two from sinking to the depths.

Alas, for all hermits there are too many depths. That is why they long so much for a friend and for his heights.

Our faith in others betrays wherein we would dearly like to have faith in ourselves. Our longing for a friend is our betrayer.

And often with our love we only want to leap over envy. And often we attack and make an enemy in order to conceal that we are vulnerable to attack.

‘At least be my enemy!’ – thus speaks the true reverence, that does not venture to ask for friendship.

If you want a friend, you must also be willing to wage war for him: and to wage war, you must be
capable
of being an enemy.

You should honour even the enemy in your friend. Can you go near to your friend without going over to him?

In your friend you should possess your best enemy. Your heart should feel closest to him when you oppose him.

Do you wish to go naked before your friend? Is it in honour of your friend that you show yourself to him as you are? But he wishes you to the Devil for it!

He who makes no secret of himself excites anger in others: that is how much reason you have to fear nakedness! If you were gods you could then be ashamed of your clothes!

You cannot adorn yourself too well for your friend: for you should be to him an arrow and a longing for the Superman.

Have you ever watched your friend asleep – to discover what he looked like? Yet your friend’s face is something else beside. It is your own face, in a rough and imperfect mirror.

Have you ever watched your friend asleep? Were you not startled to see what he looked like? O my friend, man is something that must be overcome.

The friend should be a master in conjecture and in keeping silence: you must not want to see everything. Your dream should tell you what your friend does when awake.

May your pity be a conjecture: that you may first know if your friend wants pity. Perhaps what he loves in you is the undimmed eye and the glance of eternity.

Let your pity for your friend conceal itself under a hard shell; you should break a tooth biting upon it. Thus it will have delicacy and sweetness.

Are you pure air and solitude and bread and medicine to your friend? Many a one cannot deliver himself from his own chains and yet he is his friend’s deliverer.

Are you a slave? If so, you cannot be a friend. Are you a tyrant? If so, you cannot have friends.

In woman, a slave and a tyrant have all too long been concealed. For that reason, woman is not yet capable of friendship: she knows only love.

In a woman’s love is injustice and blindness towards all that she does not love. And in the enlightened love of a
woman, too, there is still the unexpected attack and lightning and night, along with the light.

Woman is not yet capable of friendship: women ate still cats and birds. Or, at best, cows.

Woman is not yet capable of friendship. But tell me, you men, which of you is yet capable of friendship?

Oh your poverty, you men, and your avarice of soul! As much as you give to your friend I will give even to my enemy, and will not have grown poorer in doing so.

There is comradeship: may there be friendship!

Thus spoke Zarathustra.

Of the Thousand and One Goals

Z
ARATHUSTRA
has seen many lands and many peoples: thus he has discovered the good and evil of many peoples. Zarathustra has found no greater power on earth than good and evil.

No people could live without evaluating; but if it wishes to maintain itself it must not evaluate as its neighbour evaluates.

Much that seemed good to one people seemed shame and disgrace to another: thus I found. I found much that was called evil in one place was in another decked with purple honours.

One neighbour never understood another: his soul was always amazed at his neighbour’s madness and wickedness.

A table of values hangs over every people. Behold, it is the table of its overcomings; behold, it is the voice of its will to power.

What it accounts hard it calls praiseworthy; what it accounts indispensable and hard it calls good; and that which relieves the greatest need, the rare, the hardest of all – it glorifies as holy.

Whatever causes it to rule and conquer and glitter, to the dread and envy of its neighbour, that it accounts the
sublimest, the paramount, the evaluation and the meaning of all things.

Truly, my brother, if you only knew a people’s need and land and sky and neighbour, you could surely divine the law of its overcomings, and why it is upon this ladder that it mounts towards its hope.

‘You should always be the first and outrival all others: your jealous soul should love no one, except your friend’ -this precept made the soul of a Greek tremble: in following it he followed his path to greatness.

‘To speak the truth and to know well how to handle bow and arrow’ – this seemed both estimable and hard to that people from whom! got my name – a name which is both estimable and hard to me.
¹⁰

‘To honour father and mother and to do their will even from the roots of the soul’: another people hung this table of overcoming over itself and became mighty and eternal with it.

‘To practise loyalty and for the sake of loyalty to risk honour and blood even in evil and dangerous causes’: another people mastered itself with such teaching, and thus mastering itself it became pregnant and heavy with great hopes.

Truly, men have given themselves all their good and evil. Truly, they did not take it, they did not find it, it did not descend to them as a voice from heaven.

Man first implanted values into things to maintain himself – he created the meaning of things, a human meaning! Therefore he calls himself: ‘Man’, that is: the evaluator.

Evaluation is creation: hear it, you creative men! Valuating is itself the value and jewel of all valued things.

Only through evaluation is there value: and without evaluation the nut of existence would be hollow. Hear it, you creative men!

A change in values – that means a change in the creators of values. He who has to be a creator always has to destroy.

Peoples were the creators at first; only later were individuals creators. Indeed, the individual himself is still the latest creation.

Once the peoples hung a table of values over themselves. The love that wants to rule and the love that wants to obey created together such tables as these.

Joy in the herd is older than joy in the Ego: and as long as the good conscience is called herd, only the bad conscience says: I.