Will—so is the emancipator and joy-bringer called: thus have I taught you, my friends! But now learn this likewise: the Will itself is still a prisoner.
Willing emancipateth: but what is that called which still putteth the emancipator in chains?
“It was”: thus is the Will’s teeth-gnashing and lonesomest tribulation called. Impotent towards what hath been done—it is a malicious spectator of all that is past.
Not backward can the Will will; that it cannot break time and time’s desire—that is the Will’s lonesomest tribulation.
Willing emancipateth: what doth Willing itself devise in order to get free from its tribulation and mock at its prison?
Ah, a fool becometh every prisoner! Foolishly delivereth itself also the imprisoned Will.
That time doth not run backward—that is its animosity: “That which was”: so is the stone which it cannot roll called.
And thus doth it roll stones out of animosity and ill-humour, and taketh revenge on whatever doth not, like it, feel rage and ill-humour.
Thus did the Will, the emancipator, become a torturer; and on all that is capable of suffering it taketh revenge, because it cannot go backward.
This, yea, this alone is REVENGE itself: the Will’s antipathy to time, and its “It was.”
Verily, a great folly dwelleth in our Will; and it became a curse unto all humanity, that this folly acquired spirit!
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'.