Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Thus Spoke Zarathustra is less academically philosophical, but rather seeking to be educational to practical people. Zarathustra was a spiritual figure (also translated as Zoroaster) who’s mainly known for espousing the duality of good and evil in Zoroastrianism, but Nietzsche’s Zarathustra is completely different from the historical one and the name is almost satirically mocking of the original figure due to how different the ideas are between the two. The work is a collection of poetic and lyrical sayings by Zarathustra, who tries to teach the way of the “overman”, one who, through overcoming worldly struggles and pinning its faith on itself rather than idols and Gods, attains worldly transcendence and superiority. I found the language a bit poetic and Nietzsche a bit preachy, but the tone does fit the work – nevertheless, the ideas are salient, and are as difficult as they are beautifully idealistic.
The one allegory that represents the whole of Nietzsche’s idea of the overman’s journey is that of the camel, the lion, and the child. The camel represents the stage of grueling and developing self-discipline: the camel bears a heavy burden by struggling and pursuing some worldly ideal or goal, and ends up in a desert of loneliness as the rest of society can’t and won’t bear such burdens. Then, the camel metamorphizes into a lion, who seeks to be the master of its freedom and fight the dragon named “Thou shalt”: slaying the dragon means letting go of society’s norms and demands. The final stage is the metamorphosis into the child, who is free from society and is master of its own world. The child is imbued with lightness and beginning, lightness symbolic of the effortless mastery over self, and beginning represents Nietzsche’s idea of eternal recurrence, where one accepts that time is infinite, that events of this life will happen again and again – the child accepts eternal recurrence, and is joyful and says “yes” to overcome and become master of itself again and again, for all eternity. The allegory is too fantastical to be practical, yet it does create a poetic vision of how people can struggle toward something even in a world without God’s guidance. Whether the end goal is attained is as irrelevant as debating the factual truth or falsity of the allegory – the struggle, the journey, the fantastical metamorphoses, these are the arenas where life happens.
% grep -i "thus spoke zarathustra" quotes.txt7 matches
on beauty
“The struggle and inequality are present even in beauty. How divinely vaults and arches break through each other in a wrestling match; how they strive against each other with light and shade, the godlike strivers – with such assurance and beauty let us be enemies too, my friends! Let us strive against one another like gods”
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
on boldness
“Brave, unconcerned, mocking, violent – thus wisdom wants us: she is a woman and always loves only a warrior”
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
on struggle
“Life wants to build itself up into the heights with pillars and steps; it wants to look into vast distances and out toward stirring beauties: therefore it requires height. And because it requires height, it requires steps and contradiction among the steps and the climbers”
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
on luck
“O heaven over me, pure and high! Chance, that is what your purity is to me now, that there is no eternal spider or spider web of reason; that you are to me a dance floor for divine accidents, that you are to me a divine table for divine dice and dice players”
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
on teaching
“One repays a teacher badly if one always remains nothing but a pupil”
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
on ideals
“I knew noble men who lost their highest hope. Then they slandered all high hopes. Then they lived impudently in brief pleasures and barely cast their goals beyond the day. The wings of their spirit broke, and now their spirit crawls about and soils what it gnaws. Once they thought of becoming heroes: now they are voluptuaries. The hero is for them an offense and a fright”
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
on religion
“Weariness that wants to reach the ultimate with one leap, with one fatal leap, a poor ignorant weariness that does not want to want any more: this created all gods and afterworlds”
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra