doctrine The sacred Yea to life and fate, including its pain; the child's innocence, the marriage-ring of recurrence, 'Was that life? Once more!'
But tell me, my brethren, what the child can do, which even the lion could not do? Why hath the preying lion still to become a child? Innocence is the child, and forgetfulness, a new beginning, a game, a self-rolling…
The child is a holy Yea to life, which the lion's Nay could not supply.
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 new will approves the path man has followed blindly instead of slinking aside from it.
Read in the book →Ye tell me, “Life is hard to bear.” But for what purpose should ye have your pride in the morning and your resignation in the evening? Life is hard to bear: but do not affect to be so delicate! We are all of us fine…
Against complaints that life is hard, he says we love life because we are wont to love, and light things like butterflies show happiness.
Read in the book →God is a conjecture: but who could drink all the bitterness of this conjecture without dying? Shall his faith be taken from the creating one, and from the eagle his flights into eagle-heights? God is a thought—it maketh…
The best similes should praise time and becoming and justify all perishableness.
Read in the book →Since humanity came into being, man hath enjoyed himself too little: that alone, my brethren, is our original sin!
Man's fault is failing to enjoy himself, not guilt or sinfulness.
Read in the book →And this is the song that Zarathustra sang when Cupid and the maidens danced together: Of late did I gaze into thine eye, O Life! And into the unfathomable did I there seem to sink. But thou pulledst me out with a…
He loves Life most when he hates her, and sinks into her unfathomable eyes again at the end.
Read in the book →In my heart do I love only Life—and verily, most when I hate her!
Zarathustra's love of life includes hatred and pain.
Read in the book →Thus spake once in a happy hour my purity: “Divine shall everything be unto me.” Then did ye haunt me with foul phantoms; ah, whither hath that happy hour now fled! “All days shall be holy unto me”—so spake once the…
The youthful vows 'Divine shall everything be unto me' and 'All days shall be holy' are ruined one by one.
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 slays even death with the cry 'Was that life? Well! Once more!'
Read in the book →Courage, however, is the best slayer, courage which attacketh: it slayeth even death itself; for it saith: “WAS THAT life? Well! Once more!”
The formula of affirming life in its entirety, anticipating the thought of recurrence.
Read in the book →O heaven above me, thou pure, thou deep heaven! Thou abyss of light! Gazing on thee, I tremble with divine desires. Up to thy height to toss myself—that is MY depth! In thy purity to hide myself—that is MINE innocence!…
The heaven's purity and innocence is the object of his longing and the ground for the Yea-saying that follows.
Read in the book →And what have I hated more than passing clouds, and whatever tainteth thee? And mine own hatred have I even hated, because it tainted thee! The passing clouds I detest—those stealthy cats of prey: they take from thee…
The clouds rob heaven and Zarathustra of the vast Yea- and Amen-saying; he prefers thunder and tempest to half-and-half doubt.
Read in the book →A blesser have I become and a Yea-sayer: and therefore strove I long and was a striver, that I might one day get my hands free for blessing.
Zarathustra names himself a blesser whose blessing is to stand over each thing as its own heaven.
Read in the book →And when I call out: “Curse all the cowardly devils in you, that would fain whimper and fold the hands and adore”—then do they shout: “Zarathustra is godless.” And especially do their teachers of submission shout…
He cooks every chance in his own pot and welcomes it only once it is cooked.
Read in the book →Thou snow-bearded, silent, winter-sky, thou round-eyed whitehead above me! Oh, thou heavenly simile of my soul and its wantonness! And MUST I not conceal myself like one who hath swallowed gold—lest my soul should be…
He bids chance come to him, innocent as a little child.
Read in the book →In my dream, in my last morning-dream, I stood to-day on a promontory— beyond the world; I held a pair of scales, and WEIGHED the world. Alas, that the rosy dawn came too early to me: she glowed me awake, the jealous…
The world is seen as a ripe apple, neither riddle nor solution, 'a humanly good thing', in contrast to the bad things said of it.
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 prizes discriminating 'I', 'Yea' and 'Nay' over the ass's indiscriminate Ye-a.
Read in the book →Ever to say YE-A—that hath only the ass learnt, and those like it!
Real affirmation is discriminating and not the ass's indiscriminate assent.
Read in the book →The past of man to redeem, and every “It was” to transform, until the Will saith: “But so did I will it! So shall I will it—”
The 'So shall I will it' anticipates the affirmation of recurrence.
Read in the book →“Do not speak further, thou convalescent!”—so answered his animals, “but go out where the world waiteth for thee like a garden. Go out unto the roses, the bees, and the flocks of doves! Especially, however, unto the…
Singing again is the first sign of affirmation after the disgust.
Read in the book →O my soul, I have taught thee to say “to-day” as “once on a time” and “formerly,” and to dance thy measure over every Here and There and Yonder. O my soul, I delivered thee from all by-places, I brushed down from thee…
The soul is given the right to say Nay like the storm and Yea like the open heaven.
Read in the book →O my soul, I gave thee the right to say Nay like the storm, and to say Yea as the open heaven saith Yea: calm as the light remainest thou, and now walkest through denying storms.
The Yea is calm and open as the sky, and it goes together with a denying that is strong.
Read in the book →That I bade thee sing,—say now, say: WHICH of us now—oweth thanks?— Better still, however: sing unto me, sing, O my soul! And let me thank thee!—
The ending turns longing into song and thanks, a gesture of affirmation.
Read in the book →Thereupon did Life look thoughtfully behind and around, and said softly: “O Zarathustra, thou art not faithful enough to me! Thou lovest me not nearly so much as thou sayest; I know thou thinkest of soon leaving me.…
Weeping together, Zarathustra values Life more than all his Wisdom.
Read in the book →Then, however, was Life dearer unto me than all my Wisdom had ever been.
Zarathustra puts love of Life above even his own Wisdom.
Read in the book →_One!_ O man! Take heed! _Two!_ What saith deep midnight’s voice indeed? _Three!_ “I slept my sleep— _Four!_ “From deepest dream I’ve woke and plead:— _Five!_ “The world is deep, _Six!_ “And deeper than the day could…
Joy is held deeper than woe and sorrow, and woe's 'Hence! Go!' is answered by joy's wish for eternity.
Read in the book →If I be a diviner and full of the divining spirit which wandereth on high mountain-ridges, ‘twixt two seas,— Wandereth ‘twixt the past and the future as a heavy cloud—hostile to sultry plains, and to all that is weary…
The cloud is charged with lightnings that 'say Yea' and 'laugh Yea', so prophecy here is affirmation.
Read in the book →Oh, how could I not be ardent for Eternity and for the marriage-ring of rings—the ring of the return?
The ardent love of Eternity is the book's Yea given its fullest form.
Read in the book →If ever I have drunk a full draught of the foaming spice- and confection-bowl in which all things are well mixed: If ever my hand hath mingled the furthest with the nearest, fire with spirit, joy with sorrow, and the…
Everything, even the evilest, is mixed into the bowl and found worthy, which is the all-embracing Yea.
Read in the book →If I be fond of the sea, and all that is sealike, and fondest of it when it angrily contradicteth me: If the exploring delight be in me, which impelleth sails to the undiscovered, if the seafarer’s delight be in my…
He loves the sea even when it contradicts him and cheers his old heart on into the boundless.
Read in the book →“Nay! Nay! Three times Nay!” exclaimed he with a strong voice, and stroked his beard—“THAT do I know better! There are still Happy Isles!
Zarathustra answers the soothsayer's emptiness with a strong refusal and insists that Happy Isles still exist.
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…
Zarathustra rests in a happiness that wants nothing different, bound to the earth by the lightest threads.
Read in the book →LITTLE maketh up the BEST happiness.
Happiness is found in the slightest things, such as a lizard's rustle, a breath or a glance.
Read in the book →Better, however, to be foolish with happiness than foolish with misfortune, better to dance awkwardly than walk lamely.
Even the worst thing is said to have two good reverse sides.
Read in the book →Amen! And glory and honour and wisdom and thanks and praise and strength be to our God, from everlasting to everlasting! —The ass, however, here brayed YE-A. He carrieth our burdens, he hath taken upon him the form of a…
The ass's Yea, which accepts everything and never says Nay, parodies Zarathustra's sacred affirmation.
Read in the book →Meanwhile one after another had gone out into the open air, and into the cool, thoughtful night; Zarathustra himself, however, led the ugliest man by the hand, that he might show him his night-world, and the great round…
The ugliest man, once the murderer of God, blesses the day and says to death 'Was that life? Once more!'
Read in the book →‘Was THAT—life?’ will I say unto death.
The formula of affirmation: willing one's whole life again, even in the face of death.
Read in the book →Sweet lyre! Sweet lyre! I love thy tone, thy drunken, ranunculine tone!—how long, how far hath come unto me thy tone, from the distance, from the ponds of love! Thou old clock-bell, thou sweet lyre! Every pain hath torn…
The ripeness of the world, with its odour of eternity, is a happiness that reaches below the day's understanding.
Read in the book →Leave me alone! Leave me alone! I am too pure for thee. Touch me not! Hath not my world just now become perfect? My skin is too pure for thy hands. Leave me alone, thou dull, doltish, stupid day! Is not the midnight…
Midnight culminates in the claim that joy is deeper still than grief.
Read in the book →For joy, although woe be deep, JOY IS DEEPER STILL THAN GRIEF CAN BE.
The key line, which is repeated in the final roundelay.
Read in the book →Joy, however, doth not want heirs, it doth not want children,—joy wanteth itself, it wanteth eternity, it wanteth recurrence, it wanteth everything eternally-like-itself.
Woe says 'Hence! Go!' while joy wants itself.
Read in the book →Said ye ever Yea to one joy? O my friends, then said ye Yea also unto ALL woe.
Affirming a single moment of joy means affirming all things, since all are enlinked.
Read in the book →Have ye now learned my song? Have ye divined what it would say? Well! Cheer up! Ye higher men, sing now my roundelay! Sing now yourselves the song, the name of which is “Once more,” the signification of which is “Unto…
The roundelay ends in joy's wish for deep eternity.
Read in the book →Brandes says that Nietzsche rejected both historical optimism and Schopenhauer's renouncing pessimism, seeking in the Greeks a pessimism of strength and exuberant power; read from his later standpoint, the Dionysian was already his counter-principle to a morality hostile to Nature and to Christianity.
Traces affirmation back to the early ideal of a healthy, tragic pessimism derived from strength rather than renunciation.
Brandes reports Nietzsche's argument that pleasure and pain are so intertwined that great joys require great sufferings, and his aristocratic attack on happiness for the greatest number; Brandes objects that common miseries such as hunger and exhausting labour bring no compensating joys.
Pleasure and pain are bound together, so whoever wants intense joy must accept suffering.
Brandes sets out Nietzsche's theory, built on Rée's evidence, that 'good' first meant noble and powerful, opposed to 'bad' as low, while the oppressed out of hatred and revenge created the opposition good–evil in which the former good become the evil; Brandes illustrates it with the Vikings' 'eagle ideal' and their victims' ideal of the lamb.
Noble valuation proceeds from triumphant self-affirmation.
Brandes summarises Nietzsche's contrast: noble morality is continual yea-saying, slave morality a continual 'Thou shalt not'.
Affirmation is the root of noble valuation.
Brandes says that no doctrine revolts Zarathustra more than the vanity of life, that he prefers pain to annihilation, and that the same love of life fills Lou von Salomé's Hymn to Life, set by Nietzsche, which thirsts even for the cup of pain and outdoes Achilles' choice of life on earth.
Love of life that embraces even sorrow, illustrated by the Hymn to Life.
Brandes says that the midnight clock's song closing the Second Dance Song, interpreted line by line in Part IV, concentrates Nietzsche's esoteric doctrine in its shortest formula: joy and woe are inseparable, saying Yea to one joy is saying Yea to all woe, and all joy wants deep eternity.
To affirm a single joy is to affirm all woe, since they are linked.
Förster-Nietzsche says that the book came into being in August 1881 at Sils Maria, when the idea of eternal recurrence, which Nietzsche in Ecce Homo calls the fundamental idea of the work and the highest formula of Yea-saying, struck him beside a rock near Surlei, and that he then resolved to reveal it through Zarathustra; the first plan was headed 'Midday and Eternity'.
Nietzsche calls recurrence the highest formula of a Yea-saying philosophy.
Mencken argues that the superman will be perfect in body and mind, delight in combat, say yes to life's pleasures and ills, be scornful, merciless and free of fear of gods and laws, owe nothing to his neighbours and sacrifice himself only for generations unborn; he will distinguish instinct from passion and renounce from expediency, as Zarathustra's sayings to the brethren and to the higher men are taken to show.
Credits the superman with saying 'yes' alike to life's pleasures and ills.
Mencken argues that Nietzsche turned recurrence into a device for exalting the superman, who knows his struggles will repeat endlessly yet, immune to pleasure and pain, faces and affirms it as part of life ('let us love it!'); Mencken accepts Vernon Lee's comparison with stoicism but rejects her likening it to Christian Science's denial of pain.
Links amor fati, loving the inevitable, to agreeing to everything that exists.
Mencken argues that Nietzsche's 'I am a dionysian! I am an immoralist!' means an ideal of facing life's horrors unafraid, slaying great enemies and bearing one's own burdens, and that this individualism appears in the homely sayings of every vigorous people.
Glosses the dionysian as fearless facing of life's horrors.
Mencken reads Nietzsche as seeing that Christian self-sacrifice defies natural selection and weakens the race, that mankind survives only because almost no one practises Christianity absolutely, and that abandoning self-sacrifice would yield a race of supermen who say 'yes' to the world.
The supermen are described as dionysians who say 'yes' to the world.
Ludovici explains that the great men in 'Redemption' are inverse cripples with one faculty overdeveloped, and that Nietzsche's redemption is the ability to say of all that is past 'Thus would I have it'; the inability to say it is the source of revenge and of punishment, its euphemism, while the man grateful even for his enemies and calamities knows neither revenge nor despair.
The redeemed man calls the worst in his life his best.
Ludovici argues that Zarathustra's cry of 'Disgust!' at his abysmal thought shows how far Nietzsche fell short of his own ideal of the man who cries da capo to all existence: his life of illness, disappointment and snubs made it impossible for him to think of eternal recurrence without loathing.
States the world-approving da capo ideal Nietzsche himself could not live.
Ludovici describes 'The Seven Seals' as Zarathustra's final paean to Eternity and to the marriage-ring of rings, the ring of the Eternal Recurrence.
The song is an affirmation of eternity.
Ludovici declines to fix an interpretation of the drunken song but notes that recurrence appears here for the last time: all delight longs for repetition, and the man who sees a joyful meaning in existence must cry 'Again!' to all his life, as a child does.
Delight wills repetition.
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 if a demon told you that you must live your life again innumerably, every pain and joy in the same sequence, you would either curse him or, in a tremendous moment, call it divine; the question 'Dost thou want this once more?' would lie as the heaviest burden on every action, and one would have to become well disposed to oneself and life to long for nothing more than this eternal sealing.
Recurrence as a test of affirmation: whether one can long for life's eternal 'sanctioning and sealing'.
Nietzsche says that the book's fundamental idea, eternal recurrence, came to him in August 1881 by a rock near Surlei at Lake Silvaplana, heralded by a rebirth of his ear for music; that the Joyful Wisdom filled the eighteen-month gestation; and that the first part was written in the winter of 1882-83 on walks around Rapallo, where Zarathustra himself as a type 'waylaid' him.
Recurrence is called the highest formula of Yea-saying; pain is not an objection to existence.
Nietzsche says that eternal recurrence is the fundamental idea of Zarathustra and the highest formula of affirmation of life ever attainable, first conceived in August 1881.
Recurrence defined as the supreme formula of affirmation.
Nietzsche says that Zarathustra stands alone, born of superabundant strength, his concept 'Dionysian' become the highest deed; in it man is constantly overcome, the Superman becomes the greatest reality, all contradictions are bound into a new unity in this most yea-saying spirit, and Zarathustra defines the highest of all living things as the soul with the longest ladder.
Zarathustra is the most yea-saying of spirits, uniting the loftiest and the basest powers.
Nietzsche says that the psychological problem of the type is how one who says and does No to everything hitherto affirmed, bears the heaviest destiny and thinks the most abysmal thoughts, can still be a dancer who finds no objection even to the eternal recurrence of existence but becomes himself 'the tremendous and unlimited saying of Yea and Amen'; this is precisely the idea of Dionysus.
Affirmation is achieved through, not despite, radical negation and the abysmal thought.
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'.
Affirmation pushed to the point of justifying everything that has been.
Nietzsche says that the formula for his destiny is found in Zarathustra's words that whoever would create in good and evil must first be a destroyer and break values, and that his Dionysian nature cannot separate the negative deed from saying Yea; as the first immoralist he is essentially the annihilator.
Negation and annihilation are inseparable from affirmation in the Dionysian nature.