In indulging and pitying lay ever my greatest danger; and all human hubbub wisheth to be indulged and tolerated.
He states that pity and indulgence were his greatest danger among men.
- PityNames indulgence and pity as the danger he lived in among men.
Commentary on this chapter
What the critics said
Brandes says that Zarathustra's greatest danger among men lay in forbearance and pity, which taught him to lie among the good, and that he returns to the free mountain air to sit among broken and half-written tables awaiting the hour when the lion comes with the doves.
Brandes says that Zarathustra's greatest danger among men lay in forbearance and pity, which taught him to lie among the good, and that he returns to the free mountain air to sit among broken and half-written tables awaiting the hour when the lion comes with the doves.
Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, Introduction to Thus Spake Zarathustra (1905) — Partisan source: the author shaped Nietzsche's posthumous reputation and is not a reliable interpreter.
Nietzsche's account of inspirationElisabeth Förster-Nietzsche · Introduction to Thus Spake Zarathustra, 1905biography
Förster-Nietzsche quotes Ecce Homo, where Nietzsche describes writing Zarathustra as inspiration in the old sense: thoughts flashing up like lightning with necessity, ecstasy, and an involuntariness of images in which all things seem to come and want to become similes.
Pity as Nietzsche's greatest dangerAnthony M. Ludovici · Notes on Thus Spake Zarathustra, 1909biography
Ludovici reads 'The Return Home' as autobiography: Nietzsche confesses that pity was his greatest danger, pitting the lawgiver's far-sighted love of posterity against a meaner sympathy for the neighbour from which he suffered, and returning to solitude to recover from his attempt to be all things to all men.
Nietzsche elsewhere
Nietzsche says that Zarathustra was written under an inspiration of revelatory force: thoughts flashed like lightning without choice, in an ecstasy where painful parts were required shades of light, and images offered themselves involuntarily, as Zarathustra says, 'all things came to one, and offered themselves as similes'.