Beyond all these do I look, as a dog looketh over the backs of thronging flocks of sheep. They are petty, good-wooled, good-willed, grey people.
As the heron looketh contemptuously at shallow pools, with backward-bent head, so do I look at the throng of grey little waves and wills and souls.
Too long have we acknowledged them to be right, those petty people: SO we have at last given them power as well;—and now do they teach that ‘good is only what petty people call good.’
And ‘truth’ is at present what the preacher spake who himself sprang from them, that singular saint and advocate of the petty people, who testified of himself: ‘I—am the truth.’
That immodest one hath long made the petty people greatly puffed up,—he who taught no small error when he taught: ‘I—am the truth.’
Hath an immodest one ever been answered more courteously?—Thou, however, O Zarathustra, passedst him by, and saidst: ‘Nay! Nay! Three times Nay!’
Thou warnedst against his error; thou warnedst—the first to do so—against pity:—not every one, not none, but thyself and thy type.
Thou art ashamed of the shame of the great sufferer; and verily when thou sayest: ‘From pity there cometh a heavy cloud; take heed, ye men!’
—When thou teachest: ‘All creators are hard, all great love is beyond their pity:’ O Zarathustra, how well versed dost thou seem to me in weather-signs!
What the critics said
Ludovici argues that in meeting the ugliest man Zarathustra shows the only right response to great misery, shame and reverence, against obtrusive pity, which is self-glorification; Nietzsche blushes for his race and wills a world where one need not blush for one's fellows.
Ludovici reads the ugliest man as the murderer of God by an atheism of the great ugly man who reveres beauty: an omniscient God's pity, lacking shame and reverence, could not be evaded and so must not exist; Zarathustra honours his self-contempt as the mark of a great despiser.
Ludovici reads the ugliest man as the murderer of God by an atheism of the great ugly man who reveres beauty: an omniscient God's pity, lacking shame and reverence, could not be evaded and so must not exist; Zarathustra honours his self-contempt as the mark of a great despiser.