XVI. Neighbour-Love

Ye crowd around your neighbour, and have fine words for it. But I say unto you: your neighbour-love is your bad love of yourselves. Ye flee unto your neighbour from yourselves, and would fain make a virtue thereof: but…

Zarathustra tells his hearers that their neighbour-love is bad love of themselves and a flight from themselves dressed up as virtue. He advises neighbour-flight and furthest love instead.

Higher than love to your neighbour is love to the furthest and future ones; higher still than love to men, is love to things and phantoms.

Love is ranked upward from the neighbour to the furthest and future ones, and higher still to things and phantoms.

The phantom that runneth on before thee, my brother, is fairer than thou; why dost thou not give unto it thy flesh and thy bones? But thou fearest, and runnest unto thy neighbour. Ye cannot endure it with yourselves,…

Zarathustra says people cannot endure themselves, so they seduce their neighbour into loving them and call in witnesses to flatter their self-image. Such love lies, makes solitude a prison, and makes the furthest ones pay for it.

I love not your festivals either: too many actors found I there, and even the spectators often behaved like actors.

Zarathustra says he does not love their festivals either, since he found too many actors there and even the spectators acted.

Not the neighbour do I teach you, but the friend. Let the friend be the festival of the earth to you, and a foretaste of the Superman. I teach you the friend and his overflowing heart. But one must know how to be a…

Zarathustra teaches the friend instead of the neighbour: a festival of the earth and a foretaste of the Superman, with an overflowing heart and a complete world to bestow. One must be a sponge to be loved by such hearts, and in the friend one loves the Superman.

My brethren, I advise you not to neighbour-love—I advise you to furthest love!—

Zarathustra restates his advice in brief: not neighbour-love but furthest love.