To despise the earthly hath your spirit been persuaded, but not your bowels: these, however, are the strongest in you!
And now is your spirit ashamed to be at the service of your bowels, and goeth by-ways and lying ways to escape its own shame.
“That would be the highest thing for me”—so saith your lying spirit unto itself—“to gaze upon life without desire, and not like the dog, with hanging-out tongue:
To be happy in gazing: with dead will, free from the grip and greed of selfishness—cold and ashy-grey all over, but with intoxicated moon-eyes!
That would be the dearest thing to me”—thus doth the seduced one seduce himself,—“to love the earth as the moon loveth it, and with the eye only to feel its beauty.
And this do I call IMMACULATE perception of all things: to want nothing else from them, but to be allowed to lie before them as a mirror with a hundred facets.”—
What the critics said
Ludovici argues that Zarathustra, though Nietzsche's opus magnum, should not be read first: many chapters are nearly meaningless without knowledge of Nietzsche's life and friendships, and its philosophical views are best clarified by his other works, which he himself regarded as preparation for it.