The Joyful Wisdom (La Gaya Scienza)

Nietzsche says that God is dead, yet as people are constituted his shadow will be shown in caves for millennia, as Buddha's was, and that we must still overcome this shadow.

Nietzsche says, through a madman in the market-place, that we have killed God, unchaining the earth from its sun and leaving us straying through infinite nothingness; the deed is so great that it has not yet reached men's ears, and the churches are now only God's tombs.

Nietzsche says, through the madman, that the killing of God may require us to become Gods ourselves merely to seem worthy of the deed.

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.

Nietzsche says, in the version that closes the fourth book of the Joyful Wisdom, that Zarathustra after ten years of solitude addresses the sun, declares himself weary of his wisdom like a bee with too much honey, and resolves to go down to men to bestow it: 'Thus began Zarathustra's down-going.'

Nietzsche says that the death of God, the Christian God becoming unworthy of belief, will bring the collapse of everything built on that belief, including all European morality, though most have not yet heard of it; yet for free spirits the news feels not like gloom but like a new dawn, opening the sea again to every hazard of the discerner.

Nietzsche says that science presupposes an unconditional will to truth that cannot be justified by utility and so means 'I will not deceive, not even myself', a moral stance that affirms another world than life; hence even godless knowers still take their fire from the Christian-Platonic belief that God is truth, and he asks what follows if God proves our most persistent lie.

Nietzsche says that the will to truth might be a concealed will to death, a principle hostile to life.

Nietzsche says that the decay of belief in the Christian God is a European event, that what defeated God was Christian morality itself, its veracity sublimated into the scientific conscience, and that rejecting the Christian interpretation confronts us with Schopenhauer's question whether existence has any significance at all, to which Schopenhauer gave only a premature, Christian-ascetic answer.

Nietzsche says that the Christian God was overcome by Christian morality itself, its ever stricter conception of veracity sublimated into the scientific conscience.