THE SPIRIT OF REVENGE: my friends, that hath hitherto been man’s best contemplation; and where there was suffering, it was claimed there was always penalty.
“Penalty,” so calleth itself revenge. With a lying word it feigneth a good conscience.
And because in the willer himself there is suffering, because he cannot will backwards—thus was Willing itself, and all life, claimed—to be penalty!
And then did cloud after cloud roll over the spirit, until at last madness preached: “Everything perisheth, therefore everything deserveth to perish!”
“And this itself is justice, the law of time—that he must devour his children:” thus did madness preach.
“Morally are things ordered according to justice and penalty. Oh, where is there deliverance from the flux of things and from the ‘existence’ of penalty?” Thus did madness preach.
“Can there be deliverance when there is eternal justice? Alas, unrollable is the stone, ‘It was’: eternal must also be all penalties!” Thus did madness preach.
“No deed can be annihilated: how could it be undone by the penalty! This, this is what is eternal in the ‘existence’ of penalty, that existence also must be eternally recurring deed and guilt!
Unless the Will should at last deliver itself, and Willing become non-Willing—:” but ye know, my brethren, this fabulous song of madness!
Nietzsche elsewhere
Nietzsche says that only Dionysus suffers as in the Night-Song, whose answer would be Ariadne, and that Zarathustra's life-task, which is also his own, is a yea-saying that justifies and redeems all that is past, quoting the passage on recasting fragments and turning every 'it was' into 'thus would I have it'.