Friedrich Nietzsche, Also Sprach Zarathustra, transl. R.J. Hollingdale 1961 (1883)

I tell you: one must have chaos in one, to give birth to a dancing star. I tell you: you still have chaos within you

Behold I shall show you the ultimate man. 'What is love? What is creation? What is Longing? What is a star?'thus asks the Ultimate Man and Blinks. The earth has become small, and upon it hops the ultimate man, who makes everything small. His race is as inexterminable as the flea.

‘We have discovered happiness,' say the Ultimate Men and blink. They have left the places where living was hard: for one needs warmth. On loves one's neighbour and rubs oneself against him: for one needs warmth

You have made your way from worm to ma, and much in you is still worm. Once you were apes, and even now man is more of an ape than any ape

Remain true to the earth, and do not believe those who speak to you of superterrestial hopes!

Once blasphemy against God was the greatest blasphemy, but God died, and thereupon these blasphemers died too. To blaspheme the earth is now the most dreadful offence

It is not your sin, but your moderation that cries to heaven, your very meanness in sinning cries to heaven

My hunger has astonishing moods

This is a bad country for hungry people     

I need companions, living ones, not dead companions and corpses which I carry with me wherever I wish

A sacred Yes is needed for the sport of creation   

To seize the right to new values     

Sleeping is no mean art: you need to stay awake all day to do it.      

this God which I created was human work 

Ever more honestly it learns to speak, the Ego: and the more it learns, the more it finds titles and honours for the body and the earth. My Ego has taught me a new pride: No longer to bury the head in the sand of heavenly things, but to carry it freelyu, an earthly head which creates meaning for the earth!

There have always been many sickly people among those who invent fables and long for God: they have a raging hate for the enlightened man and for that youngest of virtues which is called honesty.   

The body is a great intelligence, a multiplicity with one sense, a war and a peace, a herd and a herdsman

Let your virtue be too exalted for the familiarityof names   

He judged himself - that was his supreme moment     

the thought is one thing, the deed is another, and another is the image of the deed. The wheel of causality does not roll between them

That everyone can learn to read will ruin in the long run not only writing, but thinking too.

courage wants to laugh

One does not kill by anger but by laughter   

There are many souls one will never uncover unless one invents them first

the frost of solitude   

The noble man wants to create new things and a new virtue. The good man wants the old things and that the old things shall be preserved. But that is not the danger for the noble man - that he may become a good man - but that he may become a impudent one, a derider, a destroyer.

There are the consumptives of the soul: they are hardly born before they begin to die and to long for doctrines of weariness and renunciation.

Everywhere resound the voices of those who preach death: and the earth is full of those to whom death must be preached   

You should seek your enemy, you should wage your war - a war of your opinions. And if you opnion is defeated, your honesty should still cry triumph over that

Are you ugly? Very well, my brothers! Take the sublime about you, the mantle of the ugly!

there is wickedness in your sublimity, I know you

The state was invented for the superfluous

Just look at these superfluous people! They steal for themselves the works of inventors and the treasures of the wise: they call their theft culture

Just look at these superfluous people! They acquire wealth and make themselves poorer with it   

Avoid this bad odour! Leave the idolatry of the superfluous, Avoid this bad odour! Leave the smoke of these human sacrifices!

The earth still remains free for great souls. Many places are still empty 

Truly, he who possesses little is so much the less possessed: praised be a moderate poverty!

Only there where the state ceases. Does the man who is not superfluous begin: does the song of the necessary man, the unique and irreplaceable melody begin

The people have little idea of greatness, that is to say: creativeness. But they have a taste for all presenters and actors of great things

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

The actor (…) always believes in that with which he most powerfully produces belief - produces belief in himself    

Truth has never yet clung to the arm of an inflexible man   

I love the forest. It is bad to live in town: too many of the lustful live there (…) If only you had become perfect at least as animals! But to animals belongs innocence  

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!   

Man first implanted values into things to maintain himself - he created the meaning of things     

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

A change in values - that means a change in the creators of values   

He who has to be a creator always has to destroy 

The individual himself is still the latest creation   

Whatever causes [the table of values that hangs over every people] 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

It has always been creators and loving men who created good and evil 

I love him who wants to create beyond himself    

Many a one grows too old even for his truths 

All names of good and evil are images: they do not speak out, they only hint

Whenever your spirit wants to speak in images, pay heed; for that is when your virtue has its origin and beginning

May your bestowing love and your knowledge serve towards the meaning of the earth  

I have become nothing but speech     

And you yourselves should create what you have hitherto called the World; the World should be formed in your image by your reason, your will and your love!

If there were gods, how could I endure not to be a god! Therefore there are no gods

Creation - that is the great redemption of suffering     

Willing liberates  

what would there be to create if gods existed?   

I see an image sleeping in the stone, the image of my visions!

he who once towered up his thoughts in stone   

there is battle and inequality and war for power and predominance even in beauty     

How divinely vault and arch here oppose one another in the struggle: how they strive against one another with light and shadow, the divinely striving things

You want to create the world before which you can kneel   

And I desire beauty from no one as much as I desire it from you, you man of power

And do you tell me, friends, that there is no dispute over taste and tasting? But all life is dispute over taste and tasting! Taste: that is at the same time weight and scales and weigher

Written over with the signs of the past and these signs overdaubed with new signs: thus you have hidden yourselves well from all interpreters of signs!   

But how should you be able to believe, you motley-spotted men! You who are paintings of all that has ever been believed!

He who had to create always had his prophetic dreams and star auguries and he believed in belief! 

Amazing is the poverty of my ribs 

You lack innocence in desiring and you now slander desiring!

Where is beauty? Where I have to will with all my will; where I want to love and perish, that an image may not remain merely an image.

He who does not believe in himself always lies

I am too hot and scorched by my own thought: it is often about to take my breat h away. Then I have to get into the open air and away from all dusty rooms

It is a long time since I experienced the reasons for my opinions    

Poets always thing that nature herself is in love with them  

all gods are poets' images     

The statue lay in the mud of your contempt: but this precisely is its law, that its life and living beauty grow again out of contempt!

Ít was': that is what the will's teeth-gnashing and most lonely affliction is called. Powerless against that which has been done, the will is an angry spectator of all things past

You look up when you desire to be exalted. And I look down, because I am exalted

In the final analysis one experiences only oneself     

The name of the gateway is written above it: Moment

Everything straight lies', murmered the dwarf disdainfully, 'All truth is crooked, time itself is a circle.'

We smile our knowledge to one another

for the sake of foolishness is wisdom mingled with all things

O sky above me, you pure, lofty sky! This is now your purity to me, that there is no eternal reason spider and spider's web in you - that you are to me a dance floor for divine chances, that you are to me a gods' table for divine dice

He had wanted to learn what had been happening to me while he had been away: whether they had become bigger or smaller. And once he saw a row of new houses, and he marveled and said: What do these houses mean? Truly no great soul put them up as its image! [...] And Zarathustra stopped and considered. At length he said sadly: Everything has become smaller! Everywhere I see lower doors...

they would like to persuade my foot to the tick-tock measure of a small happiness 

(The fool is speaking) spit upon the great city that is the great rubbish pile where all the scum froths together! Spit upon the city of flattened souls and narrow breasts, of slant eyes and sticky fingers

This great city, and not only this fool, disgusts me. In both there is nothing to make better, nothing to make worse. […] Where one can no longer love, one should pass by. Thus spoke Zarathustra and passed by the fool and the great city.

all existence here wants to become words

O human kind, you strange thing! You noise in dark streets!

there is too much foreground in all men 

Where power is, there number becomes master: it has more power

Upon what bridge does the present go over to the hereafter?  

Sensual pleasure: (…)   the earth's garden joy, an overflowing of thanks to the present from all the future

Sensual pleasure the great symbolic happiness of a higher happiness and highest hope  

Selfishness (…) around which everything becomes a mirror     

He who will one day teach men to fly will have moved all boundary stones; all boundary stones will themselves fly into the air to him, he will baptize the earth anew - as 'the weightless'

He who wants to become light and a bird must love himself

Almost in the cradle are we presented with heavy words and values: this dowry calls itself 'Good'and Évil. For its sake are we forgiven for being alive.

And we - we bear loyally what we have been given upon hard shoulders over rugged mountains! And when we seat we are told: 'Yes, life is hard to bear!'But only man is hard to bear! That is because he bears too many foreign things upon his shoulders. Like the camel, he kneels down and lets himself be well laden. Especially the strong, weight-bearing man in whom dwell respect and awe: he has laden too many foreign heavy words and values upon himself - now life seems to him a desert!

All my progress has been an attempting and a questioning - and truly, one has to learn how to answer such questioning! That however - is to my taste: not good taste, not bad taste, but my taste, which I no longer conceal and of which I am no longer shamed

I tell myself to myself