Why I Write Such Good Books
Original German
1 Das Eine bin ich, das Andre sind meine Schriften. – Hier werde, bevor ich von ihnen selber rede, die Frage nach dem Verstanden- oder Nicht-verstandenwerden dieser Schriften berührt. Ich thue es so nachlässig, als es sich irgendwie schickt: denn diese Frage ist durchaus noch nicht an der Zeit. Ich selber bin noch nicht an der Zeit, Einige werden posthum geboren. – Irgend wann wird man Institutionen nöthig haben, in denen man lebt und lehrt, wie ich leben und lehren verstehe; vielleicht selbst, daß man dann auch eigne Lehrstühle zur Interpretation des Zarathustra errichtet. Aber es wäre ein vollkommner Widerspruch zu mir, wenn ich heute bereits Ohren und Hände für meine Wahrheiten erwartete: daß man heute nicht hört, daß man heute nicht von mir zu nehmen weiß, ist nicht nur begreiflich, es scheint mir selbst das Rechte. Ich will nicht verwechselt werden, – dazu gehört, daß ich mich selber nicht verwechsele. – Nochmals gesagt, es ist Wenig in meinem Leben nachweisbar von „bösem Willen“; auch von litterarischem „bösen Willen“ wüßte ich kaum einen Fall zu erzählen. Dagegen zu Viel von reiner Thorheit!… Es scheint mir eine der seltensten Auszeichnungen, die Jemand sich erweisen kann, wenn er ein Buch von mir in die Hand nimmt, – ich nehme selbst an, er zieht dazu die Schuhe aus, – nicht von Stiefeln zu reden… Als sich einmal der Doctor Heinrich von Stein ehrlich darüber beklagte, kein Wort aus meinem Zarathustra zu verstehn, sagte ich ihm, daß das in Ordnung: sechs Sätze daraus verstanden, das heißt: erlebt haben erhebe auf eine höhere Stufe der Sterblichen hinauf, als „moderne“ Menschen erreichen könnten. Wie könnte ich, mit diesem Gefühl der Distanz, auch nur wünschen, von den „Modernen“, die ich kenne –, gelesen zu werden! – Mein Triumph ist gerade der umgekehrte, als der Schopenhauer’s war, – ich sage „non legor, non legar“. – Nicht, daß ich das Vergnügen unterschätzen möchte, das mir mehrmals die Unschuld im Neinsagen zu meinen Schriften gemacht hat. Noch in diesem Sommer, zu einer Zeit, wo ich vielleicht mit meiner schwerwiegenden, zu schwer wiegenden Litteratur den ganzen Rest von Litteratur aus dem Gleichgewicht zu bringen vermöchte, gab mir ein Professor der Berliner Universität wohlwollend zu verstehn, ich sollte mich doch einer andern Form bedienen: so Etwas lese Niemand. – Zuletzt war es nicht Deutschland, sondern die Schweiz, die die zwei extremen Fälle geliefert hat. Ein Aufsatz des Dr. V. Widmann im „Bund“, über „Jenseits von Gut und Böse“, unter dem Titel „Nietzsche’s gefährliches Buch“, und ein Gesammt-Bericht über meine Bücher überhaupt seitens des Herrn Karl Spitteler, gleichfalls im „Bund“, sind ein Maximum in meinem Leben – ich hüte mich zu sagen wovon… Letzterer behandelte zum Beispiel meinen Zarathustra als höhere Stilübung, mit dem Wunsche, ich möchte später doch auch für Inhalt sorgen; Dr. Widmann drückte mir seine Achtung vor dem Muth aus, mit dem ich mich um Abschaffung aller anständigen Gefühle bemühe. – Durch eine kleine Tücke von Zufall war hier jeder Satz, mit einer Folgerichtigkeit, die ich bewundert habe, eine auf den Kopf gestellte Wahrheit: man hatte im Grunde Nichts zu thun, als alle „Werthe umzuwerthen“, um, auf eine sogar bemerkenswerthe Weise, über mich den Nagel auf den Kopf zu treffen – statt meinen Kopf mit einem Nagel zu treffen… Um so mehr versuche ich eine Erklärung. – Zuletzt kann Niemand aus den Dingen, die Bücher eingerechnet, mehr heraushören, als er bereits weiß. Wofür man vom Erlebnisse her keinen Zugang hat, dafür hat man kein Ohr. Denken wir uns nun einen äußersten Fall: daß ein Buch von lauter Erlebnissen redet, die gänzlich außerhalb der Möglichkeit einer häufigen oder auch nur seltneren Erfahrung liegen, – daß es die erste Sprache für eine neue Reihe von Erfahrungen ist. In diesem Falle wird einfach Nichts gehört, mit der akustischen Täuschung, daß, wo Nichts gehört wird, auch Nichts da ist… Dies ist zuletzt meine durchschnittliche Erfahrung und, wenn man will, die Originalität meiner Erfahrung. Wer Etwas von mir verstanden zu haben glaubte, hatte sich Etwas aus mir zurecht gemacht, nach seinem Bilde, – nicht selten einen Gegensatz von mir, zum Beispiel einen „Idealisten“; wer Nichts von mir verstanden hatte, leugnete, daß ich überhaupt in Betracht käme. – Das Wort „Übermensch“ zur Bezeichnung eines Typus höchster Wohlgerathenheit, im Gegensatz zu „modernen“ Menschen, zu „guten“ Menschen, zu Christen und Nihilisten – ein Wort, das im Munde eines Zarathustra, des Vernichters der Moral, ein sehr nachdenkliches Wort wird – ist fast überall mit voller Unschuld im Sinn derjenigen Werthe verstanden worden, deren Gegensatz in der Figur Zarathustra’s zur Erscheinung gebracht worden ist: will sagen als „idealistischer“ Typus einer höheren Art Mensch, halb „Heiliger“, halb „Genie“… Andres gelehrtes Hornvieh hat mich seinethalben des Darwinismus verdächtigt: selbst der von mir so boshaft abgelehnte „Heroen-Cultus“ jenes großen Falschmünzers wider Wissen und Willen, Carlyle’s, ist darin wiedererkannt worden. Wem ich in’s Ohr flüsterte, er solle sich eher noch nach einem Cesare Borgia als nach einem Parsifal umsehn, der traute seinen Ohren nicht. – Daß ich gegen Besprechungen meiner Bücher, insonderheit durch Zeitungen, ohne jedwede Neugierde bin, wird man mir verzeihn müssen. Meine Freunde, meine Verleger wissen das und sprechen mir nicht von dergleichen. In einem besondren Falle bekam ich einmal Alles zu Gesicht, was über ein einzelnes Buch — es war „Jenseits von Gut und Böse“ — gesündigt worden ist; ich hätte einen artigen Bericht darüber abzustatten. Sollte man es glauben, daß die Nationalzeitung — eine preußische Zeitung, für meine ausländischen Leser bemerkt, — ich selbst lese, mit Verlaub, nur das Journal des Débats — allen Ernstes das Buch als ein „Zeichen der Zeit“ zu verstehn wußte, als die echte rechte Junker-Philosophie, zu der es der Kreuzzeitung nur an Muth gebreche?...
2 DIES war für Deutsche gesagt: Denn überall sonst habe ich Leser — lauter ausgesuchte Intelligenzen, bewährte, in hohen Stellungen und Pflichten erzogene Charaktere; ich habe sogar wirkliche Genie’s unter meinen Lesern. In Wien, in St. Petersburg, in Stockholm, in Kopenhagen, in Paris und New-York — überall bin ich entdeckt: ich bin es nicht in Europa’s Flachland Deutschland... Und, daß ich es bekenne, ich freue mich noch mehr über meine Nicht-Leser, solche, die weder meinen Namen, noch das Wort Philosophie je gehört haben; aber wohin ich komme, hier in Turin zum Beispiel, erheitert und vergütigt sich bei meinem Anblick jedes Gesicht. Was mir bisher am meisten geschmeichelt hat, das ist, daß alte Hökerinnen nicht Ruhe haben, bevor sie mir nicht das Süßeste aus ihren Trauben zusammengesucht haben. So weit muß man Philosoph sein... Man nennt nicht umsonst die Polen die Franzosen unter den Slaven. Eine charmante Russin wird sich nicht einen Augenblick darüber vergreifen, wohin ich gehöre. Es gelingt mir nicht, feierlich zu werden, ich bringe es höchstens bis zur Verlegenheit... Deutsch denken, deutsch fühlen — ich kann Alles, aber das geht über meine Kräfte... Mein alter Lehrer Ritschl behauptete sogar, ich concipirte selbst noch meine philologischen Abhandlungen wie ein Pariser romancier — absurd spannend. In Paris selbst ist man erstaunt über „toutes mes audaces et finesses“ — der Ausdruck ist von Monsieur Taine —; ich fürchte, bis in die höchsten Formen des Dithyrambus findet man bei mir von jenem Salze beigemischt, das niemals dumm — „deutsch“ — wird, esprit... Ich kann nicht anders. Gott helfe mir! Amen. — Wir wissen Alle, Einige wissen es sogar aus Erfahrung, was ein Langohr ist. Wohlan, ich wage zu behaupten, daß ich die kleinsten Ohren habe. Dies interessirt gar nicht wenig die Weiblein —, es scheint mir, sie fühlen sich besser von mir verstanden?... Ich bin der Antiesel par excellence und damit ein welthistorisches Unthier, — ich bin, auf griechisch, und nicht nur auf griechisch, der Antichrist...
3 ICH kenne einigermaaßen meine Vorrechte als Schriftsteller; in einzelnen Fällen ist es mir auch bezeugt, wie sehr die Gewöhnung an meine Schriften den Geschmack „verdirbt“. Man hält einfach andre Bücher nicht mehr aus, am wenigsten philosophische. Es ist eine Auszeichnung ohne Gleichen, in diese vornehme und delikate Welt einzutreten, — man darf dazu durchaus kein Deutscher sein; es ist zuletzt eine Auszeichnung, die man sich verdient haben muß. Wer mir aber durch Höhe des Wollens verwandt ist, erlebt dabei wahre Ekstasen des Lernens: denn ich komme aus Höhen, die kein Vogel je erflog, ich kenne Abgründe, in die noch kein Fuß sich verirrt hat. Man hat mir gesagt, es sei nicht möglich, ein Buch von mir aus der Hand zu legen, — ich störte selbst die Nachtruhe... Es giebt durchaus keine stolzere und zugleich raffinirtere Art von Büchern: — sie erreichen hier und da das Höchste, was auf Erden erreicht werden kann, den Cynismus; man muß sie sich ebenso mit den zartesten Fingern wie mit den tapfersten Fäusten erobern. Jede Gebrechlichkeit der Seele schließt aus davon, ein für alle Male, selbst jede Dyspepsie: man muß keine Nerven haben, man muß einen fröhlichen Unterleib haben. Nicht nur die Armuth, die Winkel-Luft einer Seele schließt davon aus, noch viel mehr das Feige, das Unsaubere, das Heimlich-Rachsüchtige in den Eingeweiden: ein Wort von mir treibt alle schlechten Instinkte in’s Gesicht. Ich habe an meinen Bekannten mehrere Versuchsthiere, an denen ich mir die verschiedene, sehr lehrreich verschiedene Reaktion auf meine Schriften zu Gemüthe führe. Wer Nichts mit ihrem Inhalte zu thun haben will, meine sogenannten Freunde zum Beispiel, wird dabei „unpersönlich“: man wünscht mir Glück, wieder „so weit“ zu sein, — auch ergäbe sich ein Fortschritt in einer größeren Heiterkeit des Tons... Die vollkommen lasterhaften „Geister“, die „schönen Seelen“, die in Grund und Boden Verlogenen wissen schlechterdings nicht, was sie mit diesen Büchern anfangen sollen, — folglich sehn sie dieselben unter sich, die schöne Folgerichtigkeit aller „schönen Seelen“. Das Hornvieh unter meinen Bekannten, bloße Deutsche, mit Verlaub, giebt zu verstehn, man sei nicht immer meiner Meinung, aber doch mitunter... Ich habe dies selbst über den Zarathustra gehört... Insgleichen ist jeder „Femininismus“ im Menschen, auch im Manne, ein Thorschluß für mich: man wird niemals in dies Labyrinth verwegener Erkenntnisse eintreten. Man muß sich selbst nie geschont haben, man muß die Härte in seinen Gewohnheiten haben, um unter lauter harten Wahrheiten wohlgemuth und heiter zu sein. Wenn ich mir das Bild eines vollkommnen Lesers ausdenke, so wird immer ein Unthier von Muth und Neugierde daraus, außerdem noch etwas Biegsames, Listiges, Vorsichtiges, ein geborner Abenteurer und Entdecker. Zuletzt: ich wüßte es nicht besser zu sagen, zu wem ich im Grunde allein rede, als es Zarathustra gesagt hat: wem allein will er sein Räthsel erzählen?
„Euch, den kühnen Suchern, Versuchern, und wer je sich mit listigen Segeln auf furchtbare Meere einschiffte, —euch, den Räthsel-Trunkenen, den Zwielicht-Frohen, deren Seele mit Flöten zu jedem Irrschlunde gelockt wird:— denn nicht wollt ihr mit feiger Hand einem Faden nachtasten; und wo ihr errathen könnt, da haßt ihr es, zu erschließen...“
4 ICH sage zugleich noch ein allgemeines Wort über meine Kunst des Stils. Einen Zustand, eine innere Spannung von Pathos durch Zeichen, eingerechnet das Tempo dieser Zeichen, mitzutheilen — das ist der Sinn jedes Stils; und in Anbetracht, daß die Vielheit innerer Zustände bei mir außerordentlich ist, giebt es bei mir viele Möglichkeiten des Stils — die vielfachste Kunst des Stils überhaupt, über die je ein Mensch verfügt hat. Gut ist jeder Stil, der einen inneren Zustand wirklich mittheilt, der sich über die Zeichen, über das Tempo der Zeichen, über die Gebärden — alle Gesetze der Periode sind Kunst der Gebärde — nicht vergreift. Mein Instinkt ist hier unfehlbar. — Guter Stil an sich — eine reine Thorheit, bloßer „Idealismus“: etwa, wie das „Schöne an sich“, wie das „Gute an sich“, wie das „Ding an sich“... Immer noch vorausgesetzt, daß es Ohren giebt — daß es Solche giebt, die eines gleichen Pathos fähig und würdig sind, daß Die nicht fehlen, denen man sich mittheilen darf. — Mein Zarathustra zum Beispiel sucht einstweilen noch nach Solchen — ach, er wird noch lange zu suchen haben! — Man muß dessen werth sein, ihn zu hören... Und bis dahin wird es Niemanden geben, der die Kunst, die hier verschwendet worden ist, begreift: es hat nie Jemand mehr von neuen, von unerhörten, von wirklich erst dazu geschaffnen Kunstmitteln zu verschwenden gehabt. Daß dergleichen gerade in deutscher Sprache möglich war, blieb zu beweisen: ich selbst hätte es vorher am härtesten abgelehnt. Man weiß vor mir nicht, was man mit der deutschen Sprache kann, — was man überhaupt mit der Sprache kann. Die Kunst des großen Rhythmus, der große Stil der Periodik, zum Ausdruck eines ungeheuren Auf und Nieder von sublimer, von übermenschlicher Leidenschaft, ist erst von mir entdeckt; mit einem Dithyrambus wie dem letzten des dritten Zarathustra, „die sieben Siegel“ überschrieben, flog ich tausend Meilen über Das hinaus, was bisher Poesie hieß.
5 DASS aus meinen Schriften ein Psychologe redet, der nicht seines Gleichen hat, das ist vielleicht die erste Einsicht, zu der ein guter Leser gelangt — ein Leser, wie ich ihn verdiene, der mich liest, wie gute alte Philologen ihren Horaz lasen. Die Sätze, über die im Grunde alle Welt einig ist — gar nicht zu reden von den Allerwelts-Philosophen, den Moralisten und andren Hohltöpfen, Kohlköpfen — erscheinen bei mir als Naivetäten des Fehlgriffs: zum Beispiel jener Glaube, daß „unegoistisch“ und „egoistisch“ Gegensätze sind, während das ego selbst bloß ein „höherer Schwindel“, ein „Ideal“ ist... Es giebt weder egoistische, noch unegoistische Handlungen: beide Begriffe sind psychologischer Widersinn. Oder der Satz „der Mensch strebt nach Glück“... Oder der Satz „das Glück ist der Lohn der Tugend“... Oder der Satz „Lust und Unlust sind Gegensätze“... Die Circe der Menschheit, die Moral, hat alle psychologica in Grund und Boden gefälscht — vermoralisirt — bis zu jenem schauderhaften Unsinn, daß die Liebe etwas „Unegoistisches“ sein soll... Man muß fest auf sich sitzen, man muß tapfer auf seinen beiden Beinen stehn, sonst kann man gar nicht lieben. Das wissen zuletzt die Weiblein nur zu gut: sie machen sich den Teufel was aus selbstlosen, aus bloß objektiven Männern... Darf ich anbei die Vermuthung wagen, daß ich die Weiblein kenne? Das gehört zu meiner dionysischen Mitgift. Wer weiß? vielleicht bin ich der erste Psycholog des Ewig-Weiblichen. Sie lieben mich Alle — eine alte Geschichte: die verunglückten Weiblein abgerechnet, die „Emancipirten“, denen das Zeug zu Kindern abgeht. — Zum Glück bin ich nicht Willens, mich zerreißen zu lassen: das vollkommne Weib zerreißt, wenn es liebt... Ich kenne diese liebenswürdigen Mänaden... Ah, was für ein gefährliches, schleichendes, unterirdisches kleines Raubthier! Und so angenehm dabei!... Ein kleines Weib, das seiner Rache nachrennt, würde das Schicksal selbst über den Haufen rennen. — Das Weib ist unsäglich viel böser als der Mann, auch klüger; Güte am Weibe ist schon eine Form der Entartung... Bei allen sogenannten „schönen Seelen“ giebt es einen physiologischen Übelstand auf dem Grunde, — ich sage nicht Alles, ich würde sonst medicynisch werden. Der Kampf um gleiche Rechte ist sogar ein Symptom von Krankheit: jeder Arzt weiß das. — Das Weib, je mehr Weib es ist, wehrt sich ja mit Händen und Füßen gegen Rechte überhaupt: der Naturzustand, der ewige Krieg zwischen den Geschlechtern giebt ihm ja bei weitem den ersten Rang. — Hat man Ohren für meine Definition der Liebe gehabt? es ist die einzige, die eines Philosophen würdig ist. Liebe — in ihren Mitteln der Krieg, in ihrem Grunde der Todhaß der Geschlechter. — Hat man meine Antwort auf die Frage gehört, wie man ein Weib kurirt — „erlöst“? Man macht ihm ein Kind. Das Weib hat Kinder nöthig, der Mann ist immer nur Mittel: also sprach Zarathustra. — „Emancipation des Weibes“ — das ist der Instinkthaß des mißrathenen, das heißt gebäruntüchtigen Weibes gegen das wohlgerathene, — der Kampf gegen den „Mann“ ist immer nur Mittel, Vorwand, Taktik. Sie wollen, indem sie sich hinaufheben, als „Weib an sich“, als „höheres Weib“, als „Idealistin“ von Weib, das allgemeine Rang-Niveau des Weibes herunterbringen; kein sichereres Mittel dazu als Gymnasial-Bildung, Hosen und politische Stimmvieh-Rechte. Im Grunde sind die Emancipirten die Anarchisten in der Welt des „Ewig-Weiblichen“, die Schlechtweggekommenen, deren unterster Instinkt Rache ist... Eine ganze Gattung des bösartigsten „Idealismus“ — der übrigens auch bei Männern vorkommt, zum Beispiel bei Henrik Ibsen, dieser typischen alten Jungfrau — hat als Ziel, das gute Gewissen, die Natur in der Geschlechtsliebe zu vergiften... Und damit ich über meine in diesem Betracht ebenso honnette als strenge Gesinnung keinen Zweifel lasse, will ich noch einen Satz aus meinem Moral-Codex gegen das Laster mittheilen: mit dem Wort Laster bekämpfe ich jede Art Widernatur oder, wenn man schöne Worte liebt, Idealismus. Der Satz heißt: „die Predigt der Keuschheit ist eine öffentliche Aufreizung zur Widernatur. Jede Verachtung des geschlechtlichen Lebens, jede Verunreinigung desselben durch den Begriff „unrein“ ist das Verbrechen selbst am Leben, — ist die eigentliche Sünde wider den heiligen Geist des Lebens.“ —
6 UM einen Begriff von mir als Psychologen zu geben, nehme ich ein curioses Stück Psychologie, das in „Jenseits von Gut und Böse“ vorkommt, — ich verbiete übrigens jede Muthmaaßung darüber, wen ich an dieser Stelle beschreibe. „Das Genie des Herzens, wie es jener große Verborgene hat, der Versucher-Gott und geborne Rattenfänger der Gewissen, dessen Stimme bis in die Unterwelt jeder Seele hinabzusteigen weiß, welcher nicht ein Wort sagt, nicht einen Blick blickt, in dem nicht eine Rücksicht und Falte der Lockung läge, zu dessen Meisterschaft es gehört, daß er zu scheinen versteht — und nicht Das, was er ist, sondern was Denen, die ihm folgen, ein Zwang mehr ist, um sich immer näher an ihn zu drängen, um ihm immer innerlicher und gründlicher zu folgen... Das Genie des Herzens, das alles Laute und Selbstgefällige verstummen macht und horchen lehrt, das die rauhen Seelen glättet und ihnen ein neues Verlangen zu kosten giebt: — still zu liegen, wie ein Spiegel, daß sich der tiefe Himmel auf ihnen spiegele... Das Genie des Herzens, das die tölpische und überrasche Hand zögern und zierlicher greifen lehrt; das den verborgenen und vergessenen Schatz, den Tropfen Güte und süßer Geistigkeit unter trübem dickem Eise erräth und eine Wünschelruthe für jedes Korn Goldes ist, welches lange im Kerker vielen Schlammes und Sandes begraben lag... Das Genie des Herzens, von dessen Berührung Jeder reicher fortgeht, nicht begnadet und überrascht, nicht wie von fremdem Gute beglückt und bedrückt, sondern reicher an sich selber, sich neuer als zuvor, aufgebrochen, von einem Thauwinde angeweht und ausgehorcht, unsicherer vielleicht, zärtlicher zerbrechlicher zerbrochener, aber voll Hoffnungen, die noch keinen Namen haben, voll neuen Willens und Strömens, voll neuen Unwillens und Zurückströmens...“
Musean translation
A complete machine-assisted Musean translation directly from the German of the 1908 Insel edition, including its concluding poem. This early edition's readings and omissions are retained, not replaced with later critical restorations.
1 I am one thing, my writings another.—Before I speak of the writings themselves, let me touch on the question of their being understood or not understood. I do so as casually as decency permits: for this question is not yet timely at all. I myself am not yet timely; some are born posthumously.—One day there will be a need for institutions in which people live and teach as I understand living and teaching; perhaps special chairs will even be established for the interpretation of Zarathustra. But it would utterly contradict me to expect ears and hands for my truths today: that people do not hear me today, that they do not know how to receive anything from me, is not merely understandable; to me it even seems right. I do not want to be mistaken for someone else—and that means not mistaking myself for someone else.—To say it again, there is little evidence of “ill will” in my life; I could scarcely recount a single case even of literary “ill will.” On the other hand, far too much of sheer stupidity!… It seems to me one of the rarest distinctions a person can confer upon himself to take up a book of mine—I even assume he takes off his shoes to do so, to say nothing of boots… When Dr. Heinrich von Stein once complained in all sincerity that he did not understand a word of my Zarathustra, I told him that this was as it should be: to have understood six sentences from it—that is, to have lived them—would raise him to a higher order of mortals than “modern” people could reach. With this feeling of distance, how could I so much as wish to be read by the “moderns” I know!—My triumph is precisely the reverse of Schopenhauer’s—I say, “I am not read; I will not be read.”—Not that I would underrate the pleasure I have several times derived from the innocence with which my writings have been rejected. Just this summer, at a time when my weighty, all-too-weighty literature might perhaps have thrown all the rest of literature off balance, a professor at the University of Berlin benevolently gave me to understand that I really ought to try a different form: no one read anything like this.—In the end it was not Germany but Switzerland that supplied the two extreme cases. An essay by Dr. V. Widmann in the Bund on Beyond Good and Evil, entitled “Nietzsche’s Dangerous Book,” and an overall account of my books by Mr. Karl Spitteler, likewise in the Bund, mark an extreme in my life—I take care not to say of what… The latter treated my Zarathustra, for example, as an advanced exercise in style, expressing the wish that I might later see to the content as well; Dr. Widmann conveyed his respect for the courage with which I strove to abolish all decent feelings.—By a small trick of chance, every sentence here was a truth turned on its head, with a consistency I admired: at bottom one had only to “revalue all values” to hit the nail on the head about me, and even remarkably well—instead of hitting my head with a nail… So let me try all the harder to explain.—In the end, no one can hear more in things, books included, than he already knows. What we have no access to through lived experience, we have no ear for. Now let us imagine an extreme case: a book speaks of nothing but experiences entirely beyond the possibility of frequent or even infrequent experience—it is the first language for a new range of experiences. In this case, quite simply, nothing is heard, accompanied by the acoustic illusion that where nothing is heard, nothing is there… This, after all, is my usual experience and, if you like, the originality of my experience. Whoever thought he had understood something of me had fashioned something out of me in his own image—not infrequently my opposite, an “idealist,” for example; whoever had understood nothing of me denied that I deserved any consideration at all.—The word “overman,” designating a type of supreme human flourishing, in contrast to “modern” people, to “good” people, to Christians and nihilists—a word that, in the mouth of Zarathustra, the destroyer of morality, becomes a very thought-provoking word—has almost everywhere been understood, in perfect innocence, in the sense of those values whose opposite is embodied in the figure of Zarathustra: that is, as the “idealistic” type of a higher kind of human being, half “saint,” half “genius”… Other learned cattle have suspected me of Darwinism on its account: people have even recognized in it that “hero worship” I so maliciously rejected, the cult of that great unwitting and unwilling counterfeiter, Carlyle. Anyone into whose ear I whispered that he should look for a Cesare Borgia rather than a Parsifal could not believe his ears.—I must be forgiven for having no curiosity whatever about reviews of my books, especially in newspapers. My friends and my publishers know this and do not speak to me of such things. In one particular case I once saw everything that had been perpetrated against a single book—it was Beyond Good and Evil; I could give an entertaining account of it. Would anyone believe that the Nationalzeitung—a Prussian newspaper, I should mention for my foreign readers; I myself, with your permission, read only the Journal des Débats—quite seriously contrived to understand the book as a “sign of the times,” as the genuine, authentic Junker philosophy for which the Kreuzzeitung merely lacked the courage?…
2 This was said for Germans: for everywhere else I have readers—nothing but select intelligences, proven characters schooled in high positions and duties; I even have genuine geniuses among my readers. In Vienna, in St. Petersburg, in Stockholm, in Copenhagen, in Paris and New York—everywhere I have been discovered: I have not been discovered in Europe’s flatland, Germany… And, to confess it, I take still greater pleasure in those who do not read me, people who have never heard either my name or the word philosophy; yet wherever I go, here in Turin for example, every face brightens and grows kinder at the sight of me. What has flattered me most so far is that old market women will not rest until they have picked out the sweetest of their grapes for me. One must be a philosopher to that extent… It is not for nothing that the Poles are called the French among the Slavs. A charming Russian woman will not mistake for an instant where I belong. I cannot manage to become solemn; at most I become embarrassed… To think German, to feel German—I can do anything, but that is beyond my powers… My old teacher Ritschl even maintained that I conceived my philological treatises like a Parisian novelist—absurdly gripping. In Paris itself people marvel at “all my audacities and subtleties”—the phrase is Monsieur Taine’s; I fear that even in the highest forms of the dithyramb, something of that salt is found mixed into me which never becomes stupid—“German”—wit… I cannot do otherwise. God help me! Amen.—We all know, some even from experience, what a long-eared ass is. Well then, I dare to claim that I have the smallest ears. This interests the little women more than a little—it seems to me they feel better understood by me?… I am the supreme anti-ass, and thus a monster of world-historical proportions—I am, in Greek and not only in Greek, the Antichrist…
3 I have some idea of my privileges as a writer; in particular cases I have also been shown how thoroughly familiarity with my writings “spoils” the taste. Other books simply become unbearable, philosophical books least bearable of all. It is a distinction beyond compare to enter this noble and delicate world—one absolutely must not be German to do so; in the end it is a distinction one must have earned. But anyone akin to me in the height of his willing experiences true ecstasies of learning here: for I come from heights no bird has ever reached in flight; I know abysses into which no foot has yet strayed. I have been told that it is impossible to put down a book of mine—that I even disturb a night’s rest… There is simply no prouder and at the same time more refined kind of book: here and there they attain the highest that can be attained on earth, cynicism; they must be conquered with the most delicate fingers as much as with the bravest fists. Every infirmity of soul bars one from them once and for all, even any dyspepsia: one must have no nerves, one must have a cheerful belly. It is not merely the poverty of a soul, its stuffy backroom air, that bars one, but far more the cowardice, the uncleanliness, the secret vengefulness in the bowels: a word from me drives every bad instinct into the face. Among my acquaintances I have several experimental animals through whom I bring home to myself the different, instructively different reactions to my writings. Those who want nothing to do with their content—my so-called friends, for example—become “impersonal” about them: they congratulate me on having come “so far” again—and there is progress, too, they say, in the greater cheerfulness of the tone… The thoroughly vicious “spirits,” the “beautiful souls,” those who are liars through and through, have absolutely no idea what to do with these books—and therefore see them as beneath them, the beautiful consistency of all “beautiful souls.” The cattle among my acquaintances—mere Germans, with your permission—give me to understand that they are not always of my opinion, but sometimes they are… I have heard this even about Zarathustra… Likewise, any “femininity” in a person, even in a man, closes the gate to me: such a person will never enter this labyrinth of audacious insights. One must never have spared oneself, one must have hardness among one’s habits, to be in good spirits and cheerful among nothing but hard truths. When I imagine the picture of a perfect reader, it always becomes a monster of courage and curiosity, with something supple, cunning, cautious besides, a born adventurer and discoverer. Finally: I could find no better way of saying to whom alone I speak, at bottom, than Zarathustra’s way: to whom alone does he want to tell his riddle?
“To you, bold seekers, tempters, and whoever has ever embarked with cunning sails upon terrible seas—to you, drunk with riddles, glad of twilight, whose soul is lured by flutes into every treacherous abyss:—for you do not want to grope along a thread with a cowardly hand; and where you can divine, you hate to deduce…”
4 Let me also say a general word about my art of style. To communicate a state, an inner tension of feeling, through signs, including the tempo of these signs—that is the meaning of every style; and since the multiplicity of inner states in me is extraordinary, I have many possibilities of style—the most multifarious art of style that any human being has ever commanded. Every style is good that truly communicates an inner state, that makes no mistake about the signs, about the tempo of the signs, about the gestures—all the laws of the periodic sentence are an art of gesture. Here my instinct is infallible.—Good style in itself—sheer stupidity, mere “idealism”: like the “beautiful in itself,” the “good in itself,” the “thing in itself”… Always assuming that there are ears—that there are people capable and worthy of the same feeling, that those to whom one may communicate oneself are not lacking.—My Zarathustra, for example, is still looking for such people—ah, he will have to keep looking for a long time!—One must be worthy of hearing him… And until then there will be no one who comprehends the art lavished here: no one has ever had so many new, unheard-of artistic means to lavish, means truly created for the first time for this purpose. That anything like this was possible in the German language of all languages remained to be proved: I myself would previously have been the most vehement in denying it. Before me, no one knows what can be done with the German language—what can be done with language at all. The art of the great rhythm, the grand style of the periodic sentence, expressing a tremendous rise and fall of sublime, of superhuman passion, was first discovered by me; with a dithyramb like the last in the third Zarathustra, entitled “The Seven Seals,” I flew a thousand miles beyond what had been called poetry until then.
5 That a psychologist without equal speaks from my writings is perhaps the first insight a good reader reaches—a reader such as I deserve, who reads me as good old philologists read their Horace. The propositions on which basically everyone agrees—not to mention the commonplace philosophers, moralists, and other empty pots and cabbage heads—appear in my work as naïve blunders: for example, the belief that “unegoistic” and “egoistic” are opposites, when the ego itself is merely a “higher swindle,” an “ideal”… There are neither egoistic nor unegoistic actions: both concepts are psychological nonsense. Or the proposition “man strives for happiness”… Or the proposition “happiness is the reward of virtue”… Or the proposition “pleasure and displeasure are opposites”… Morality, humanity’s Circe, has falsified everything psychological through and through—moralized it—right down to the appalling nonsense that love is supposed to be something “unegoistic”… One must be firmly settled in oneself, one must stand bravely on one’s own two legs, or one cannot love at all. The little women, after all, know this only too well: they do not give a damn for selfless, merely objective men… May I venture the conjecture, in passing, that I know the little women? That belongs to my Dionysian dowry. Who knows? Perhaps I am the first psychologist of the Eternal Feminine. They all love me—an old story: except for the ill-constituted little women, the “emancipated,” who lack the capacity to bear children.—Fortunately I have no intention of letting myself be torn apart: the perfect woman tears apart when she loves… I know these lovable maenads… Ah, what a dangerous, stealthy, subterranean little beast of prey! And so pleasant with it!… A little woman running after her revenge would run down fate itself.—Woman is unspeakably more evil than man, and cleverer too; goodness in a woman is already a form of degeneration… In all so-called “beautiful souls” there is a physiological disorder at bottom—I do not say everything, or I would become medicynical. The struggle for equal rights is itself a symptom of sickness: every physician knows that.—The more woman a woman is, the more she fights tooth and nail against rights of any kind: the natural state, the eternal war between the sexes, gives her by far the foremost rank.—Have people had ears for my definition of love? It is the only one worthy of a philosopher. Love—war in its means, the deadly hatred of the sexes at its core.—Have people heard my answer to the question of how to cure a woman—“redeem” her? Make her pregnant. Woman needs children, man is always merely a means: thus spoke Zarathustra.—“The emancipation of woman”—that is the instinctive hatred of the ill-constituted woman, that is, the woman unfit to bear children, for the well-constituted woman—the struggle against “man” is always merely a means, a pretext, a tactic. By raising themselves up as “woman in herself,” as the “higher woman,” as a female “idealist,” they want to bring down the general level of woman’s rank; there is no surer means of doing so than a university-preparatory education, trousers, and political rights as voting cattle. At bottom, the emancipated are the anarchists in the world of the “Eternal Feminine,” those who have come off badly, whose deepest instinct is revenge… A whole species of the most malignant “idealism”—which also occurs in men, incidentally, for example in Henrik Ibsen, that typical old maid—aims to poison the good conscience, the naturalness of sexual love… And to leave no doubt about my attitude in this matter, as honorable as it is strict, I will give one more proposition from my moral code against vice: with the word vice I combat every kind of unnaturalness—or, if one loves fine words, idealism. The proposition runs: “The preaching of chastity is a public incitement to unnaturalness. Every contempt for sexual life, every defilement of it through the concept ‘unclean,’ is the crime against life itself—is the true sin against the holy spirit of life.”—
6 To give an idea of myself as a psychologist, I take a curious piece of psychology that occurs in Beyond Good and Evil—I forbid, incidentally, any conjecture about whom I am describing in this passage. “The genius of the heart, such as that great hidden one possesses, the tempter-god and born pied piper of consciences, whose voice knows how to descend into the underworld of every soul, who speaks not a word, casts not a glance, without some careful thought and subtle twist of enticement within it, whose mastery includes knowing how to appear—and not as what he is, but as what offers those who follow him one more compulsion to press ever closer to him, to follow him ever more inwardly and thoroughly… The genius of the heart, which silences everything loud and self-satisfied and teaches it to listen, which smooths rough souls and gives them a new longing to taste: to lie still like a mirror, so that the deep sky may be reflected upon them… The genius of the heart, which teaches the clumsy and overhasty hand to hesitate and grasp more delicately; which divines the hidden and forgotten treasure, the drop of goodness and sweet spirituality beneath murky, thick ice, and is a divining rod for every grain of gold long buried in a dungeon of mud and sand… The genius of the heart, from whose touch everyone goes away richer, not favored by grace and surprised, not gladdened and burdened as though by another’s goods, but richer in himself, newer to himself than before, broken open, breathed upon and sounded out by a thawing wind, perhaps more uncertain, tenderer, more fragile, more broken, but full of hopes that have no name as yet, full of new will and surging, full of new discontent and ebbing…”
Plain English translation
A complete machine-assisted Plain English translation made independently and directly from the same German edition, including its concluding poem. This is the 1908 text, not a modern critical edition.
1 I am one thing; my writings are another.—Before I talk about the writings themselves, I will touch on whether people understand them or do not understand them. I will do this as casually as I can decently manage. The time for this question has not come at all. My own time has not come yet. Some people are born after their deaths.—Someday people will need institutions where they live and teach as I understand living and teaching. Perhaps they will even set up special university chairs to interpret Zarathustra. But I would completely contradict myself if I already expected ears and hands for my truths today. It is not just understandable that people do not hear me today, that they do not know how to take anything from me. It even seems right to me. I do not want to be confused with anyone else—and that means I must not confuse myself with anyone else.—Again, there is little evidence of “ill will” in my life. I could hardly name a case of literary “ill will” either. But there is far too much sheer stupidity!… It seems to me one of the rarest honors anyone can do himself to pick up a book of mine. I even assume that he takes off his shoes for the occasion—not to mention his boots… Once Dr. Heinrich von Stein honestly complained that he could not understand a word of my Zarathustra. I told him that was quite all right. To have understood six sentences from it—that is, to have lived through them—would raise someone to a higher level among mortals than “modern” people could reach. With this feeling of distance, how could I even wish to be read by the “modern people” I know!—My triumph is just the opposite of Schopenhauer’s. I say, “I am not read; I will not be read.”—Not that I want to underrate the pleasure I have several times taken in the innocence with which people reject my writings. Just this summer, at a time when my weighty, all-too-weighty writing might throw all other writing off balance, a professor at the University of Berlin kindly suggested that I should use a different form. Nobody, he said, reads this sort of thing.—In the end it was not Germany but Switzerland that supplied the two extreme cases. An article by Dr. V. Widmann in the “Bund” about “Beyond Good and Evil,” titled “Nietzsche’s Dangerous Book,” and an overall account of my books by Mr. Karl Spitteler, also in the “Bund,” mark a high point in my life—I am careful not to say of what… The latter, for instance, treated my Zarathustra as an advanced exercise in style, with the wish that later I might also provide some content. Dr. Widmann expressed his respect for the courage with which I was working to abolish all decent feelings.—Through a small trick of chance, every sentence here was a truth turned upside down, with a consistency I admired. Basically, all one had to do was “revalue all values” to hit the nail on the head about me, quite remarkably—instead of hitting my head with a nail… So I will make all the more effort to explain.—In the end, no one can hear more in things, books included, than he already knows. If you have no access to something through experience, you have no ear for it. Now imagine an extreme case: a book speaks entirely of experiences that lie completely beyond the possibility of frequent or even fairly rare experience. It is the first language for a new set of experiences. In this case people simply hear nothing. They suffer from the acoustic illusion that where nothing is heard, nothing is there either… This, in short, is my usual experience and, if you like, the originality of my experience. Anyone who thought he had understood something of me had made something out of me in his own image—quite often my opposite, an “idealist,” for example. Anyone who understood nothing of me denied that I mattered at all.—The word “overman” describes a type that has turned out supremely well, in contrast to “modern” people, “good” people, Christians, and nihilists. In the mouth of a Zarathustra, the destroyer of morality, this word gives one much to think about. Almost everywhere, people have understood it with complete innocence in terms of the very values whose opposite the figure of Zarathustra embodies. That is, they take it to mean an “idealistic” type of higher human being, half “saint,” half “genius”… Other learned cattle have suspected me of Darwinism on its account. People have even recognized in it Carlyle’s “hero worship,” which I so spitefully rejected—Carlyle, that great counterfeiter who did not know or mean to be one. When I whispered in someone’s ear that he should look for a Cesare Borgia rather than a Parsifal, he could not believe his ears.—You will have to forgive my complete lack of curiosity about reviews of my books, especially in newspapers. My friends and publishers know this and do not talk to me about such things. In one particular case I once saw all the sins committed against a single book—it was “Beyond Good and Evil.” I could give a pretty account of them. Would anyone believe that the Nationalzeitung—a Prussian newspaper, I mention for my foreign readers; I myself, if you please, read only the Journal des Débats—quite seriously took the book as a “sign of the times,” as the genuine philosophy of the Junkers that the Kreuzzeitung merely lacked the courage to express?…
2 That was said for Germans. Everywhere else I have readers—all of them exceptional minds, proven characters trained in high positions and responsibilities. I even have real geniuses among my readers. In Vienna, in St. Petersburg, in Stockholm, in Copenhagen, in Paris, and in New York—everywhere I have been discovered. I have not been discovered in Europe’s flatland, Germany… And I admit that I take even more pleasure in my nonreaders, people who have never heard either my name or the word philosophy. Wherever I go, here in Turin for instance, every face grows brighter and kinder at the sight of me. What has flattered me most so far is that old market women cannot rest until they have picked out their sweetest grapes for me. A philosopher must go that far… It is not for nothing that the Poles are called the French of the Slavs. A charming Russian woman will not be mistaken for a moment about where I belong. I cannot manage to be solemn. At most I become embarrassed… To think like a German, to feel like a German—I can do anything, but that is beyond my powers… My old teacher Ritschl even claimed that I planned my philological papers like a Parisian novelist—absurdly gripping. In Paris itself people are amazed at “all my daring and subtleties”—Monsieur Taine’s words. I fear that even in the highest forms of the dithyramb people find in me a dash of that salt which never becomes stupid—“German”—namely wit… I cannot do otherwise. God help me! Amen.—We all know, some of us even from experience, what a long-eared ass is. Well then, I dare to claim that I have the smallest ears. This interests the little women quite a bit. It seems to me that they feel I understand them better?… I am the anti-ass above all others, and therefore a monster of world-historical importance. In Greek, and not only in Greek, I am the Antichrist…
3 I have some sense of my privileges as a writer. In individual cases, people have also told me how much getting used to my writings “spoils” their taste. They simply cannot stand other books anymore, least of all philosophical ones. It is an honor like no other to enter this noble and delicate world. You absolutely must not be a German to do so. In the end it is an honor you must have earned. But anyone related to me through the height of his aspirations experiences real ecstasies of learning here. For I come from heights no bird has ever reached in flight. I know depths where no foot has ever strayed. People have told me they cannot put down a book of mine—that I even disturb their sleep… There is no prouder and at the same time more refined kind of book. Here and there they reach the highest thing that can be reached on earth: cynicism. You must win them for yourself with the most delicate fingers as well as the bravest fists. Any weakness of the soul shuts you out of them once and for all—even any indigestion. You must not be nervous; you must have a cheerful belly. It is not just the poverty of a soul, its stuffy backroom air, that shuts people out. Far more, it is the cowardice, the dirt, the secret desire for revenge in their guts. A word from me brings every bad instinct to the surface of the face. Among my acquaintances I have several experimental animals. They let me study the different, instructively different reactions to my writings. Anyone who wants nothing to do with their content—my so-called friends, for example—becomes “impersonal” about them. They congratulate me on being “that far along” again. They also see progress in the greater cheerfulness of the tone… The thoroughly vicious “spirits,” the “beautiful souls,” the people who are false through and through, simply do not know what to do with these books. So they regard the books as beneath them—the beautiful consistency of all “beautiful souls.” The cattle among my acquaintances—mere Germans, if you please—give me to understand that they do not always agree with me, but sometimes do… I have even heard this about Zarathustra… Likewise, any “femininity” in a person, even in a man, means a closed gate to me. Such a person will never enter this maze of daring insights. You must never have spared yourself. Hardness must be part of your habits if you are to feel well and cheerful among nothing but hard truths. When I picture a perfect reader, he always turns into a monster of courage and curiosity. He is also something flexible, cunning, cautious: a born adventurer and discoverer. Finally, I could find no better words than Zarathustra’s for saying who my only real audience is. To whom alone does he want to tell his riddle?
“To you, the bold seekers, the experimenters, and whoever has ever set sail with cunning sails on terrible seas—to you, drunk on riddles, happy in the twilight, whose soul is lured by flutes to every treacherous abyss:—for you do not want to feel your way along a thread with a coward’s hand; and where you can guess, you hate to deduce…”
4 I will also say something general here about my art of style. To communicate a state, an inner tension of strong feeling, through signs—including the pace of those signs—that is the point of every style. And since I have an extraordinary range of inner states, I have many possibilities of style. I have the most varied art of style any human being has ever had. Any style is good if it really communicates an inner state, if it makes no mistake about the signs, their pace, or the gestures—all the rules of long, structured sentences are an art of gesture. My instinct here is infallible.—Good style in itself is sheer stupidity, mere “idealism,” like the “beautiful in itself,” the “good in itself,” the “thing in itself”… All this still assumes that there are ears to hear—that there are people capable and worthy of the same intensity of feeling, that there are people to whom one may communicate oneself.—My Zarathustra, for instance, is still looking for such people—oh, he will have to keep looking for a long time!—You must be worthy of hearing him… Until then there will be no one who understands the art lavished here. No one has ever had so many new, unheard-of artistic means to lavish, means really created for the first time to do this. That such a thing was possible in German, of all languages, still had to be proved. I myself would have denied it most emphatically beforehand. Before me, people do not know what can be done with German—what can be done with language at all. I was the first to discover the art of great rhythm, the grand style of long, structured sentences, which expresses an enormous rise and fall of sublime, superhuman passion. With a dithyramb like the last one in the third part of Zarathustra, titled “The Seven Seals,” I flew a thousand miles beyond what had been called poetry until then.
5 The first insight a good reader reaches may be that a psychologist without an equal speaks through my writings. I mean a reader such as I deserve, who reads me as good old philologists read their Horace. Statements on which basically everyone agrees—not to mention the commonplace philosophers, moralists, and other empty heads and cabbageheads—appear in my work as naive blunders. Take, for instance, the belief that “unselfish” and “selfish” are opposites, when the self itself is merely a “higher fraud,” an “ideal”… There are neither selfish nor unselfish actions. Both ideas are psychological nonsense. Or the statement “Human beings seek happiness”… Or the statement “Happiness is the reward of virtue”… Or the statement “Pleasure and displeasure are opposites”… Morality, humanity’s Circe, has falsified everything psychological through and through—turned it into morality—right up to the dreadful nonsense that love is supposed to be something “unselfish”… You must be firmly seated on yourself, you must stand bravely on your own two legs, or you simply cannot love. The little women know this only too well, after all. They do not give a damn about selfless men, men who are merely objective… May I venture to suggest, by the way, that I know the little women? That is part of my Dionysian endowment. Who knows? Perhaps I am the first psychologist of the eternal feminine. They all love me—an old story, apart from the failed little women, the “emancipated” ones, who do not have what it takes to bear children.—Luckily, I have no intention of letting myself be torn apart. The perfect woman tears apart when she loves… I know these lovable maenads… Ah, what a dangerous little predator, creeping along underground! And so pleasant at the same time!… A little woman chasing her revenge would knock fate itself flat.—Woman is indescribably more evil than man, and cleverer too. Goodness in a woman is already a form of degeneration… All so-called “beautiful souls” have an underlying physiological problem. I am not saying everything, or I would turn medically cynical. The struggle for equal rights is itself a symptom of sickness. Every doctor knows that.—The more a woman is a woman, the more she fights tooth and nail against rights in general. The state of nature, the eternal war between the sexes, gives her by far the highest rank.—Have people had ears for my definition of love? It is the only one worthy of a philosopher. Love—war in its methods, the deadly hatred between the sexes at its root.—Have people heard my answer to the question of how to cure a woman—to “redeem” her? Get her pregnant. Woman needs children; man is always only a means: thus spoke Zarathustra.—“Women’s emancipation” is the instinctive hatred of the failed woman, meaning one who cannot bear children, for the woman who has turned out well. The struggle against “man” is always just a means, a pretext, a tactic. By raising themselves up as “woman in herself,” as “higher woman,” as the “idealist” kind of woman, they want to lower the general rank of women. There is no surer means to this than an academic high-school education, pants, and political rights as voting cattle. Basically, emancipated women are the anarchists in the world of the “eternal feminine,” the ones who have come off badly, whose deepest instinct is revenge… A whole species of the most malicious “idealism”—which also occurs in men, for example in Henrik Ibsen, that typical old maid—aims to poison the good conscience, the naturalness of sexual love… And to leave no doubt about my views here, which are as honest as they are strict, I will share another statement from my moral code against vice. With the word vice I fight everything against nature—or, if you like fine words, idealism. The statement reads: “Preaching chastity is a public incitement to acts against nature. Every contempt for sexual life, every defilement of it through the idea of ‘impurity,’ is the crime against life itself—is the real sin against the holy spirit of life.”—
6 To give some idea of me as a psychologist, I will take an unusual piece of psychology from “Beyond Good and Evil.” I forbid any guesses, by the way, about whom I am describing here. “The genius of the heart, such as that great hidden one has, the tempter god and born pied piper of consciences, whose voice knows how to descend into the underworld of every soul. He says no word, casts no glance, without some thought and a subtle twist of enticement in it. Part of his mastery is knowing how to appear—not as what he is, but as what gives his followers one more compelling reason to press ever closer to him, to follow him ever more inwardly and thoroughly… The genius of the heart, which silences everything loud and self-satisfied and teaches it to listen, which smooths rough souls and gives them a taste of a new desire: to lie still like a mirror, so that the deep sky may be reflected in them… The genius of the heart, which teaches the clumsy, overhasty hand to pause and grasp more delicately; which senses the hidden and forgotten treasure, the drop of goodness and sweet spirituality beneath cloudy, thick ice, and is a divining rod for every grain of gold long buried in a prison of mud and sand… The genius of the heart, from whose touch everyone goes away richer—not blessed with a gift and surprised, not delighted and burdened as by someone else’s possessions, but richer in himself, newer to himself than before, broken open, blown upon and sounded out by a thawing wind, perhaps less sure, more tender, more breakable, more broken, but full of hopes that have no name yet, full of new willing and flowing, full of new unwillingness and flowing back…”
About this section
Why I Write Such Good Books is part of Ecce Homo by Friedrich Nietzsche. This page sets the German original beside 2 direct-source translations, so any line can be checked against the source. It is chapter 5 of 17 in the work, which is kept in the European tradition.
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