theme Love peace as a means to new wars; courage as the best slayer, slaying even death; the warrior's obedience and disobedience.
My brother, if thou be fortunate, then wilt thou have one virtue and no more: thus goest thou easier over the bridge. Illustrious is it to have many virtues, but a hard lot; and many a one hath gone into the wilderness…
War, envy and distrust among the virtues are called necessary.
Read in the book →In the mountains the shortest way is from peak to peak, but for that route thou must have long legs. Proverbs should be peaks, and those spoken to should be big and tall. The atmosphere rare and pure, danger near and…
Wisdom is a woman who loves only a warrior: courageous, unconcerned, scornful, coercive.
Read in the book →By our best enemies we do not want to be spared, nor by those either whom we love from the very heart. So let me tell you the truth! My brethren in war! I love you from the very heart. I am, and was ever, your…
Zarathustra asks for warriors rather than uniformed soldiers, who seek their own enemy and fight for their thoughts.
Read in the book →Ye shall love peace as a means to new wars—and the short peace more than the long. You I advise not to work, but to fight. You I advise not to peace, but to victory. Let your work be a fight, let your peace be a…
Peace is valued only as a means to new wars, and the good war hallows every cause.
Read in the book →Ye say it is the good cause which halloweth even war? I say unto you: it is the good war which halloweth every cause.
It reverses the usual justification of war by its cause.
Read in the book →They call you heartless: but your heart is true, and I love the bashfulness of your good-will. Ye are ashamed of your flow, and others are ashamed of their ebb. Ye are ugly? Well then, my brethren, take the sublime…
Warriors are to honour their enemies, hating but never despising them, and to share in their successes.
Read in the book →Resistance—that is the distinction of the slave. Let your distinction be obedience. Let your commanding itself be obeying! To the good warrior soundeth “thou shalt” pleasanter than “I will.” And all that is dear unto…
The warrior's distinction is obedience, not the slave's resistance, and commanding is itself a form of obeying.
Read in the book →Let your love to life be love to your highest hope; and let your highest hope be the highest thought of life! Your highest thought, however, ye shall have it commanded unto you by me—and it is this: man is something…
The warrior lives a life of obedience and war and does not wish to be spared.
Read in the book →And often with our love we want merely to overleap envy. And often we attack and make ourselves enemies, to conceal that we are vulnerable. “Be at least mine enemy!”—thus speaketh the true reverence, which doth not…
To have a friend one must be willing to wage war for him, and so be capable of being an enemy.
Read in the book →Everything in woman is a riddle, and everything in woman hath one solution—it is called pregnancy. Man is for woman a means: the purpose is always the child. But what is woman for man? Two different things wanteth the…
Man is to be trained for war and woman for the warrior's recreation.
Read in the book →And when I want to mount my wildest horse, then doth my spear always help me up best: it is my foot’s ever ready servant:— The spear which I hurl at mine enemies! How grateful am I to mine enemies that I may at last…
He thanks his enemies for giving him someone to hurl his spear at.
Read in the book →And just behold, my friends! Here where the tarantula’s den is, riseth aloft an ancient temple’s ruins—just behold it with enlightened eyes! Verily, he who here towered aloft his thoughts in stone, knew as well as the…
Struggle and enmity are shown as beautiful, with Zarathustra asking his friends to be enemies steadfastly and beautifully.
Read in the book →But there is something in me which I call courage: it hath hitherto slain for me every dejection. This courage at last bade me stand still and say: “Dwarf! Thou! Or I!”— For courage is the best slayer,—courage which…
Courage that attacks slays dejection, giddiness at abysses, and fellow-suffering.
Read in the book →I love the brave: but it is not enough to be a swordsman,—one must also know WHEREON to use swordsmanship! And often is it greater bravery to keep quiet and pass by, that THEREBY one may reserve oneself for a worthier…
Bravery means choosing a worthy foe to hate and be proud of, and passing others by.
Read in the book →With those rhymes of Zarathustra the kings were delighted; the king on the right, however, said: “O Zarathustra, how well it was that we set out to see thee! For thine enemies showed us thy likeness in their mirror:…
The kings quote Zarathustra's teaching of peace as a means to new wars and the good war that hallows every cause.
Read in the book →We must HEAR him; him who teacheth: ‘Ye shall love peace as a means to new wars, and the short peace more than the long!’
The king recalls the earlier teaching that peace is to be loved only as a means to new wars.
Read in the book →Ye are only bridges: may higher ones pass over upon you!
He treats his warriors without indulgence, and the sickly would tumble at the beating of his drums.
Read in the book →He hath heart who knoweth fear, but VANQUISHETH it; who seeth the abyss, but with PRIDE.
Courage is defined as knowing fear and vanquishing it, seeing the abyss with pride.
Read in the book →Courage, however, and adventure, and delight in the uncertain, in the unattempted—COURAGE seemeth to me the entire primitive history of man.
Zarathustra makes courage, not fear, the root of human history and of the spirit.
Read in the book →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?
What the critics said
Brandes argues that Nietzsche, loving struggle for its own sake, counts as progress only the rearing of a higher, stronger species, the Superman, even at the sacrifice of masses, and that this vision so resembles Renan's half-jesting dream of a manufactory of gods that Renan's influence can scarcely be doubted, though Nietzsche turned it into dogma and never credited him.
The greatness of a movement is measured by the sacrifices it demands.
Brandes argues that Nietzsche, like Hartmann, denies the possibility of equality and peace because life is inequality and war, praising the good war that hallows every cause, and that both reflect the militarism of the new German Empire, Nietzsche differing only in wanting war so that manliness may not die out.
Brandes traces the praise of war to the spirit of Bismarck's Germany.
Mencken argues that for Nietzsche instinct and experiment reveal one's power, that happiness lies in unrestrained yielding to the will to power through constant contest, citing Zarathustra's 'not to peace, but to victory' and casting dice with death, and that this means a crusade against ethics of self-sacrifice for inferiors and a transvaluation that frees the will to power from infamy.
Uses Zarathustra's call to victory over peace as a rule for constant testing and elimination of the unfit.
Ludovici argues that depriving a higher man of his so-called wickedness may do violence to the greatest in him, and that the noblest wickedness, that of courage and determination, is vanishing under slave-moralities, which is why Nietzsche cried that man's baddest is so small and that to be brave is good.
Courage as the noble wickedness Nietzsche wished to preserve.
Ludovici holds that Zarathustra's greeting confirms his thesis that the philosophy aims to give higher men the great hope, but harshly: Nietzsche would be a hard bed to higher men, making them harder, not easing their way.
'I do not treat my warriors indulgently.'
Ludovici argues that by making the conscientious specialist the only one to resist the magician's melancholy music, Nietzsche pays high tribute to the honesty of the scientist, and uses the debate on fear to restate that courage is the entire primitive history of man.
Courage as the driving force of human development.