doctrine Remain true to the earth; the body is the great reason, the self that the spirit serves; against despisers of the body.
When Zarathustra arrived at the nearest town which adjoineth the forest, he found many people assembled in the market-place; for it had been announced that a rope-dancer would give a performance. And Zarathustra spake…
He demands fidelity to the earth and rejects otherworldly hopes and contempt for the body.
Read in the book →I conjure you, my brethren, REMAIN TRUE TO THE EARTH, and believe not those who speak unto you of superearthly hopes!
The famous charge to stay faithful to the earth rather than to otherworldly hopes.
Read in the book →Suffering was it, and impotence—that created all backworlds; and the short madness of happiness, which only the greatest sufferer experienceth. Weariness, which seeketh to get to the ultimate with one leap, with a…
The body despaired of the body and the earth, then imagined an 'other world' that is really a celestial naught.
Read in the book →A new pride taught me mine ego, and that teach I unto men: no longer to thrust one’s head into the sand of celestial things, but to carry it freely, a terrestrial head, which giveth meaning to the earth!
The upright ego, the creating and evaluing measure of things, implies the body and gives the earth its meaning.
Read in the book →A new pride taught me mine ego, and that teach I unto men: no longer to thrust one’s head into the sand of celestial things, but to carry it freely, a terrestrial head, which giveth meaning to the earth!
The chapter's core charge: carry the head freely on earth instead of burying it in heavenly things.
Read in the book →Many sickly ones have there always been among those who muse, and languish for God; violently they hate the discerning ones, and the latest of virtues, which is uprightness. Backward they always gaze toward dark ages:…
Even those who long for God believe most in their own body, and the healthy body speaks of the meaning of the earth.
Read in the book →“Body am I, and soul”—so saith the child. And why should one not speak like children? But the awakened one, the knowing one, saith: “Body am I entirely, and nothing more; and soul is only the name of something in the…
Soul is reduced to a name for something in the body, and the body is called a 'big sagacity' that outweighs the ego.
Read in the book →The body is a big sagacity, a plurality with one sense, a war and a peace, a flock and a shepherd.
The chapter's central formulation of the body as a great reason.
Read in the book →What the sense feeleth, what the spirit discerneth, hath never its end in itself. But sense and spirit would fain persuade thee that they are the end of all things: so vain are they. Instruments and playthings are sense…
The Self, identified with the body, rules the ego and uses thought to serve its pain and pleasure.
Read in the book →My brother, when thou hast a virtue, and it is thine own virtue, thou hast it in common with no one. To be sure, thou wouldst call it by name and caress it; thou wouldst pull its ears and amuse thyself with it. And lo!…
The virtue is to be loved as an earthly one, not as a divine law or a guide-post to superearths and paradises.
Read in the book →What is this man? A mass of diseases that reach out into the world through the spirit; there they want to get their prey. What is this man? A coil of wild serpents that are seldom at peace among themselves—so they go…
The soul interprets the body's suffering and craving as murderous desire.
Read in the book →There are the spiritually consumptive ones: hardly are they born when they begin to die, and long for doctrines of lassitude and renunciation. They would fain be dead, and we should approve of their wish! Let us beware…
Their one-sided eye sees only one aspect of existence and so denies life and the earth.
Read in the book →I love the forest. It is bad to live in cities: there, there are too many of the lustful. 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…
He wants men to be at least as innocent as animals, not to kill their instincts.
Read in the book →Do I counsel you to slay your instincts? I counsel you to innocence in your instincts.
The instincts are to be kept innocent, not killed.
Read in the book →Would that there came preachers of SPEEDY death! Those would be the appropriate storms and agitators of the trees of life! But I hear only slow death preached, and patience with all that is “earthly.” Ah! ye preach…
Attacks preachers of slow death and patience with the 'earthly', saying the earth itself is patient with them.
Read in the book →That your dying may not be a reproach to man and the earth, my friends: that do I solicit from the honey of your soul. In your dying shall your spirit and your virtue still shine like an evening after-glow around the…
He wants his dying to make friends love the earth more, and to return to earth himself.
Read in the book →Upward soareth our sense: thus is it a simile of our body, a simile of an elevation. Such similes of elevations are the names of the virtues. Thus goeth the body through history, a becomer and fighter. And the…
The body is the becomer and fighter; the spirit is only its herald and echo.
Read in the book →Here paused Zarathustra awhile, and looked lovingly on his disciples. Then he continued to speak thus—and his voice had changed: Remain true to the earth, my brethren, with the power of your virtue! Let your bestowing…
Virtue that flies off to eternal walls must be led back to body and life to give the earth a human meaning.
Read in the book →Remain true to the earth, my brethren, with the power of your virtue!
The famous charge to stay faithful to the earth.
Read in the book →Oh, just look at those tabernacles which those priests have built themselves! Churches, they call their sweet-smelling caves! Oh, that falsified light, that mustified air! Where the soul—may not fly aloft to its height!…
He prefers the open sky, grass and poppies to the corpse-like, black-draped life of the priests.
Read in the book →Should he become weary of his sublimeness, this sublime one, then only will his beauty begin—and then only will I taste him and find him savoury. And only when he turneth away from himself will he o’erleap his own…
His happiness should smell of the earth, not of contempt for the earth, like an ox at the plough.
Read in the book →To despise the earthly hath your spirit been persuaded, but not your bowels: these, however, are the strongest in you! And now is your spirit ashamed to be at the service of your bowels, and goeth by-ways and lying ways…
The spirit has been taught to despise the earthly, but the bowels, the body's desire, are the strongest in the knowers.
Read in the book →“Since I have known the body better”—said Zarathustra to one of his disciples—“the spirit hath only been to me symbolically spirit; and all the ‘imperishable’—that is also but a simile.” “So have I heard thee say once…
Knowing the body better makes spirit and the 'imperishable' mere similes, which opens the whole discussion.
Read in the book →THE HEART OF THE EARTH IS OF GOLD.
Truth speaks from the earth's heart, which yields gold and laughter, not ashes.
Read in the book →Voluptuousness: unto all hair-shirted despisers of the body, a sting and stake; and, cursed as “the world,” by all backworldsmen: for it mocketh and befooleth all erring, misinferring teachers. Voluptuousness: to the…
Voluptuousness is a sting to the despisers of the body and the backworldsmen, but innocent happiness and a great cordial to free hearts.
Read in the book →And then it happened also,—and verily, it happened for the first time!—that his word blessed SELFISHNESS, the wholesome, healthy selfishness, that springeth from the powerful soul:— —From the powerful soul, to which the…
Healthy selfishness belongs to the high, dancing body whose self-enjoyment calls itself virtue.
Read in the book →He who one day teacheth men to fly will have shifted all landmarks; to him will all landmarks themselves fly into the air; the earth will he christen anew—as “the light body.” The ostrich runneth faster than the fastest…
The earth will be christened anew as 'the light body.'
Read in the book →Verily, neither do I like those who call everything good, and this world the best of all. Those do I call the all-satisfied. All-satisfiedness, which knoweth how to taste everything,—that is not the best taste! I honour…
He loves blood and flesh, and is repelled by mummies, phantoms and whitewashed souls.
Read in the book →“To the clean are all things clean”—thus say the people. I, however, say unto you: To the swine all things become swinish! Therefore preach the visionaries and bowed-heads (whose hearts are also bowed down): “The world…
The world has filth but is not a monster; loathing itself creates wings.
Read in the book →There standeth the boat—thither goeth it over, perhaps into vast nothingness—but who willeth to enter into this “Perhaps”? None of you want to enter into the death-boat! How should ye then be WORLD-WEARY ones!…
The earth has many good inventions for whose sake it is to be loved.
Read in the book →Thus spake the peaceful one, and puffed himself and perspired with his words: so that the kine wondered anew. Zarathustra, however, kept looking into his face with a smile, all the time the man talked so severely—and…
Zarathustra reads the beggar's character from his stomach and diet, a plant-eater who loves honey.
Read in the book →“Hush! Hush! Hath not the world now become perfect? What hath happened unto me? As a delicate wind danceth invisibly upon parqueted seas, light, feather-light, so—danceth sleep upon me. No eye doth it close to me, it…
The soul is a ship in a calm cove, drawn to the more faithful land and tied to the earth.
Read in the book →Then, however, did it come to pass that Zarathustra, astonished at such merely roguish answers, jumped back to the door of his cave, and turning towards all his guests, cried out with a strong voice: “O ye wags, all of…
Zarathustra rejects heaven outright and says men want the kingdom of earth.
Read in the book →“But we do not at all want to enter into the kingdom of heaven: we have become men,—SO WE WANT THE KINGDOM OF EARTH.”
A direct statement of fidelity to the earth against any heaven.
Read in the book →Förster-Nietzsche records that Part Three was written in Nice in winter 1883–84, 'Old and New Tables' composed on the climb to Eza amid bodily vigour and dancing, and that Part Four, written 1884–85 with interruptions, was meant 'only for my friends', printed in forty copies of which he gave away only seven, while he still planned a fifth and sixth part.
Nietzsche: 'The body is inspired: let us waive the question of the soul.'
Mencken says that critics mocked Nietzsche as an iconoclast who destroyed without rebuilding, and that Zarathustra (from April 1883) was his answer: the superman, to whom man is a bridge from the ape, the meaning of the earth to which men must stay faithful instead of seeking rewards beyond the stars.
Stresses the command to be faithful to the earth rather than look beyond the stars.
Mencken argues that Nietzsche made the improvement of the body the first step of progress, that the superman's freed will to live will be refined by natural selection into an accurate instinct, summed up in Zarathustra's 'Be hard!', and that unlike Schopenhauer, Comte and the humanitarians Nietzsche held man to be of the earth, rising only after casting off transcendental morality.
Makes bodily efficiency the precondition of all mental progress.
Mencken argues that recurrence makes the superman heroic, saying yes to life, and that Nietzsche's epistemology was a thorough-going empiricism: the superman is a materialist who knows mind only as a function of body, trusts instinct and senses, seeks knowledge of how rather than why, and is in the highest sense a utilitarian.
Holds that the superman knows mind only as a function of body and ignores the beyond.
Ludovici says that in 'The Despisers of the Body' Zarathustra calls the intellect the little sagacity and the instincts the big sagacity, endorsing Schopenhauer's view of the intellect as the body's instrument and warning against exalting reason over the instincts.
Glosses spirit as an instrument of the body and the instincts as the greater reason.
Ludovici argues that in weighing voluptuousness, lust of power and selfishness Nietzsche sought to give healthy men back innocence and a clean conscience in their desires, not to license the vulgar or the weak, and that his teaching is esoteric, meant to save higher men from compromising their genius with traditional values.
Innocence in the instincts and healthy sensual pleasure against Christian disparagement.
This is an experiment in interactive reading, and in using AI to help you grow. Thus Spake Zarathustra is notoriously difficult for a modern reader; yet taken as a set of mental exercises, it is guaranteed to transform your thinking by the time you reach the end. Along the way you will have help from the companion, who is always beside the book.
Do you accept the challenge?
Nietzsche elsewhere
Nietzsche says that 'The Night-Song' was composed in Rome above the Piazza Barberini, the second part in ten days at Sils, the third at Nice, with 'Old and New Tables' composed on the climb from the station to Eza, each part taking no more than ten days; his creative energy coincided with great bodily vigour, dancing, walking and laughter.
'The body is inspired: let us waive the question of soul.'
Nietzsche says that what sets him apart is having unmasked Christian morality, the Circe of all thinkers, as anti-nature: it teaches contempt for the instincts, invents a soul to defy the body, makes sex impure and self-love evil, and expresses the will to nonentity of decadent priests; morality is the idiosyncrasy of decadents seeking revenge on life.
Christian morality slanders the body, sex and self-love.
Nietzsche says that he has said nothing not already said through Zarathustra; unmasking morality breaks history in two, revealing that 'God', the 'beyond' and 'true world', 'soul', 'sin' and 'free will' were invented to depreciate the only world, despise the body and make the yea-sayer 'evil': Dionysus versus Christ.
The soul was invented to throw contempt on the body and its real needs.