When I came unto men, then found I them resting on an old infatuation: all of them thought they had long known what was good and bad for men.
An old wearisome business seemed to them all discourse about virtue; and he who wished to sleep well spake of “good” and “bad” ere retiring to rest.
This somnolence did I disturb when I taught that NO ONE YET KNOWETH what is good and bad:—unless it be the creating one!
—It is he, however, who createth man’s goal, and giveth to the earth its meaning and its future: he only EFFECTETH it THAT aught is good or bad.
And I bade them upset their old academic chairs, and wherever that old infatuation had sat; I bade them laugh at their great moralists, their saints, their poets, and their Saviours.
At their gloomy sages did I bid them laugh, and whoever had sat admonishing as a black scarecrow on the tree of life.
On their great grave-highway did I seat myself, and even beside the carrion and vultures—and I laughed at all their bygone and its mellow decaying glory.
Verily, like penitential preachers and fools did I cry wrath and shame on all their greatness and smallness. Oh, that their best is so very small! Oh, that their worst is so very small! Thus did I laugh.
Thus did my wise longing, born in the mountains, cry and laugh in me; a wild wisdom, verily!—my great pinion-rustling longing.
And oft did it carry me off and up and away and in the midst of laughter; then flew I quivering like an arrow with sun-intoxicated rapture:
—Out into distant futures, which no dream hath yet seen, into warmer souths than ever sculptor conceived,—where gods in their dancing are ashamed of all clothes:
(That I may speak in parables and halt and stammer like the poets: and verily I am ashamed that I have still to be a poet!)
Where all becoming seemed to me dancing of Gods, and wantoning of Gods, and the world unloosed and unbridled and fleeing back to itself:—
—As an eternal self-fleeing and re-seeking of one another of many Gods, as the blessed self-contradicting, recommuning, and refraternising with one another of many Gods:—
Where all time seemed to me a blessed mockery of moments, where necessity was freedom itself, which played happily with the goad of freedom:—
Where I also found again mine old devil and arch-enemy, the spirit of gravity, and all that it created: constraint, law, necessity and consequence and purpose and will and good and evil:—
For must there not be that which is danced OVER, danced beyond? Must there not, for the sake of the nimble, the nimblest,—be moles and clumsy dwarfs?—
Nietzsche elsewhere
Nietzsche says that 'The Night-Song' was composed in Rome above the Piazza Barberini, the second part in ten days at Sils, the third at Nice, with 'Old and New Tables' composed on the climb from the station to Eza, each part taking no more than ten days; his creative energy coincided with great bodily vigour, dancing, walking and laughter.
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.
Nietzsche says that for Zarathustra man is neither an object of love nor of pity but raw material, an ugly stone for the sculptor's chisel, quoting the passage where the creative will drives the hammer against the stone to free the Superman's image; a Dionysian task needs the hardness of the hammer and the joy even of destruction, 'all creators are hard'.
Nietzsche says that the command 'Harden yourselves!' and the conviction that all creators are hard are the distinctive sign of a Dionysian nature.
Nietzsche says that as immoralist he denies both the 'good' man and Christian morality; the good exist through falsehood, refusing to see reality and treating distress as an objection, and Zarathustra therefore calls them the last men and the beginning of the end, who crucify the writer of new values and are the most detrimental of men.
Nietzsche says that as immoralist he denies both the 'good' man and Christian morality; the good exist through falsehood, refusing to see reality and treating distress as an objection, and Zarathustra therefore calls them the last men and the beginning of the end, who crucify the writer of new values and are the most detrimental of men.