Thus Spoke Zarathustra, passage 224

They want to know whether Zarathustra still liveth. Verily, do I still live?

Thus Spoke Zarathustra, passage 2250

Thus demandeth my great love to the remotest ones: BE NOT CONSIDERATE OF THY NEIGHBOUR! Man is something that must be surpassed.

Thus Spoke Zarathustra, passage 1223

When I had said this unto Life, then laughed she maliciously, and shut her eyes. “Of whom dost thou speak?” said she. “Perhaps of me?

Thus Spoke Zarathustra, passage 1607

Verily, a great folly dwelleth in our Will; and it became a curse unto all humanity, that this folly acquired spirit!

Thus Spoke Zarathustra, passage 1818

Recognised and tested shall each be, to see if he be of my type and lineage:—if he be master of a long will, silent even when he speaketh, and giving in such wise that he TAKETH in giving:—

Thus Spoke Zarathustra, passage 832

When your heart overfloweth broad and full like the river, a blessing and a danger to the lowlanders: there is the origin of your virtue.

Thus Spoke Zarathustra, passage 1035

And others are proud of their modicum of righteousness, and for the sake of it do violence to all things: so that the world is drowned in their unrighteousness.

Thus Spoke Zarathustra, passage 2204

Unhappy do I call all those who have only one choice: either to become evil beasts, or evil beast-tamers. Amongst such would I not build my tabernacle.

Thus Spoke Zarathustra, passage 2967

After thee, however, O Zarathustra, did I fly and hie longest; and though I hid myself from thee, I was nevertheless thy best shadow: wherever thou hast sat, there sat I also.

Thus Spoke Zarathustra, passage 918

Evil do I call it and misanthropic: all that teaching about the one, and the plenum, and the unmoved, and the sufficient, and the imperishable!

Thus Spoke Zarathustra, passage 2991

This Zarathustra did; and no sooner had he laid himself on the ground in the stillness and secrecy of the variegated grass, than he had forgotten his little thirst, and fell asleep. For as the proverb of Zarathustra saith: “One thing is more necessary than the other.” Only that his eyes remained open:—for they never grew weary of viewing and admiring the tree and the love of the vine. In falling asleep, however, Zarathustra spake thus to his heart:

Thus Spoke Zarathustra, passage 2559

—Who would not hate thee, thou great bindress, inwindress, temptress, seekress, findress! Who would not love thee, thou innocent, impatient, wind-swift, child-eyed sinner!

Thus Spoke Zarathustra, passage 1802

O my brethren, I heard a laughter which was no human laughter,—and now gnaweth a thirst at me, a longing that is never allayed.

Thus Spoke Zarathustra, passage 2351

—A span-breadth from his goal, to languish! Verily, ye will have to drag him into his heaven by the hair of his head—this hero!

Thus Spoke Zarathustra, passage 3568

So far, this is perhaps the most important paragraph. It is a protest against reading a moral order of things in life. “Life is something essentially immoral!” Nietzsche tells us in the introduction to the “Birth of Tragedy”.

Thus Spoke Zarathustra, passage 118

The hour when ye say: “What good is my happiness! It is poverty and pollution and wretched self-complacency. But my happiness should justify existence itself!”

Thus Spoke Zarathustra, passage 3092

The best belongeth unto mine and me; and if it be not given us, then do we take it:—the best food, the purest sky, the strongest thoughts, the fairest women!”—

Thus Spoke Zarathustra, passage 2867

Thou thinkest thyself wise, thou proud Zarathustra! Read then the riddle, thou hard nut-cracker,—the riddle that I am! Say then: who am _I_!”

Thus Spoke Zarathustra, passage 1784

—And must we not return and run in that other lane out before us, that long weird lane—must we not eternally return?”—

Thus Spoke Zarathustra, passage 2891

That immodest one hath long made the petty people greatly puffed up,—he who taught no small error when he taught: ‘I—am the truth.’

Thus Spoke Zarathustra, passage 2874

To whom would I go but unto thee? Stay, sit down! Do not however look at me! Honour thus—mine ugliness!

Thus Spoke Zarathustra, passage 2321

“Let whoever will choke and stab and skin and scrape the people: raise not a finger against it! Thereby will they learn to renounce the world.”

Thus Spoke Zarathustra, passage 3219

In evening’s limpid air, What time the dew’s soothings Unto the earth downpour, Invisibly and unheard— For tender shoe-gear wear The soothing dews, like all that’s kind-gentle—: Bethinkst thou then, bethinkst thou, burning heart, How once thou thirstedest For heaven’s kindly teardrops and dew’s down-droppings, All singed and weary thirstedest, What time on yellow grass-pathways Wicked, occidental sunny glances Through sombre trees about thee sported, Blindingly sunny glow-glances, gladly-hurting?

Thus Spoke Zarathustra, passage 1820

And for his sake and for those like him, must I perfect MYSELF: therefore do I now avoid my happiness, and present myself to every misfortune—for MY final testing and recognition.

Thus Spoke Zarathustra, passage 2317

There is wisdom in the fact that much in the world smelleth badly: loathing itself createth wings, and fountain-divining powers!

Thus Spoke Zarathustra, passage 649

The THOU is older than the _I_; the THOU hath been consecrated, but not yet the _I_: so man presseth nigh unto his neighbour.

Thus Spoke Zarathustra, passage 2932

Now doth it provoke the lower classes, all benevolence and petty giving; and the over-rich may be on their guard!

Thus Spoke Zarathustra, passage 2895

—When thou teachest: ‘All creators are hard, all great love is beyond their pity:’ O Zarathustra, how well versed dost thou seem to me in weather-signs!

Thus Spoke Zarathustra, passage 912

And how would ye endure life without that hope, ye discerning ones? Neither in the inconceivable could ye have been born, nor in the irrational.

Thus Spoke Zarathustra, passage 626

It is laudable, what they think hard; what is indispensable and hard they call good; and what relieveth in the direst distress, the unique and hardest of all,—they extol as holy.

Thus Spoke Zarathustra, passage 741

Nobler is it to own oneself in the wrong than to establish one’s right, especially if one be in the right. Only, one must be rich enough to do so.

Thus Spoke Zarathustra, passage 1651

And if that be the true virtue which is unconscious of itself—well, the vain man is unconscious of his modesty!—

Thus Spoke Zarathustra, passage 1122

Verily, he who here towered aloft his thoughts in stone, knew as well as the wisest ones about the secret of life!

Thus Spoke Zarathustra, passage 715

Better than man doth woman understand children, but man is more childish than woman.

Thus Spoke Zarathustra, passage 2897

I warn thee also against myself. Thou hast read my best, my worst riddle, myself, and what I have done. I know the axe that felleth thee.

Thus Spoke Zarathustra, passage 374

Your slaying, ye judges, shall be pity, and not revenge; and in that ye slay, see to it that ye yourselves justify life!

Thus Spoke Zarathustra, passage 3450

Zarathustra, then,—this shadowy, allegorical personality, speaking in allegories and parables, and at times not even refraining from relating his own dreams—is a figure we can understand but very imperfectly if we have no knowledge of his creator and counterpart, Friedrich Nietzsche; and it were therefore well, previous to our study of the more abstruse parts of this book, if we were to turn to some authoritative book on Nietzsche’s life and works and to read all that is there said on the subject.

Thus Spoke Zarathustra, passage 1098

“And ‘Will to Equality’—that itself shall henceforth be the name of virtue; and against all that hath power will we raise an outcry!”

Thus Spoke Zarathustra, passage 3616

Among the higher men whom Zarathustra wishes to save, is also the scientific specialist—the man who honestly and scrupulously pursues his investigations, as Darwin did, in one department of knowledge. “I love him who liveth in order to know, and seeketh to know in order that the Superman may hereafter live. Thus seeketh he his own down-going.” “The spiritually conscientious one,” he is called in this discourse.

Thus Spoke Zarathustra, passage 602

“Be at least mine enemy!”—thus speaketh the true reverence, which doth not venture to solicit friendship.

Thus Spoke Zarathustra, passage 3261

Thou hast nourished us with strong food for men, and powerful proverbs: do not let the weakly, womanly spirits attack us anew at dessert!

Thus Spoke Zarathustra, passage 3247

The wildest and most courageous animals hath he envied and robbed of all their virtues: thus only did he become—man.

Thus Spoke Zarathustra, passage 1466

Ah, there are so many things betwixt heaven and earth of which only the poets have dreamed!

Thus Spoke Zarathustra, passage 611

In divining and keeping silence shall the friend be a master: not everything must thou wish to see. Thy dream shall disclose unto thee what thy friend doeth when awake.

Thus Spoke Zarathustra, passage 3394

Gone! Gone! O youth! O noontide! O afternoon! Now have come evening and night and midnight,—the dog howleth, the wind:

Thus Spoke Zarathustra, passage 2

At different periods in his life, he would call this haunter of his dreams by different names; “but in the end,” he declares in a note on the subject, “I had to do a PERSIAN the honour of identifying him with this creature of my fancy. Persians were the first to take a broad and comprehensive view of history. Every series of evolutions, according to them, was presided over by a prophet; and every prophet had his ‘Hazar,’—his dynasty of a thousand years.”

Thus Spoke Zarathustra, passage 3363

—Which hath already counted the smarting throbbings of your fathers’ hearts—ah! ah! how it sigheth! how it laugheth in its dream! the old, deep, deep midnight!

Thus Spoke Zarathustra, passage 1711

“Ye look aloft when ye long for exaltation, and I look downward because I am exalted.

Thus Spoke Zarathustra, passage 2973

Ah, where have gone all my goodness and all my shame and all my belief in the good! Ah, where is the lying innocence which I once possessed, the innocence of the good and of their noble lies!

Thus Spoke Zarathustra, passage 1853

—Uncloudedly to smile down out of luminous eyes and out of miles of distance, when under us constraint and purpose and guilt steam like rain.