Thus Spake Zarathustra: A Book for All and None
Naked have I seen both the greatest and the smallest man—and Zarathustra, descending from ten years of solitude in the mountains, resolves to share his hard-won wisdom with humanity. Through a sequence of prophetic discourses, parables, and wanderings, this sage proclaims the coming of the Superman, the overcoming of pity, the death of God, and the eternal recurrence of all things. He gathers disciples and abandons them, encounters kings, scholars, and a tightrope walker, and again and again retreats into solitude to ripen his teaching before returning to the world.
Written in rhapsodic, biblical cadences, Nietzsche's masterwork is at once philosophy, poetry, and parody of scripture. It advances his central provocations—the will to power, the transvaluation of all values, and humanity as a bridge to something greater than itself. Bold, ecstatic, and deliberately untimely, it challenges every inherited certainty and asks what a human being might still become.
How it begins
“Zarathustra” is my brother’s most personal work; it is the history of his most individual experiences, of his friendships, ideals, raptures, bitterest disappointments and sorrows. Above it all, however, there soars, transfiguring it, the image of his greatest hopes and remotest aims. My brother had the figure of Zarathustra in his mind from his very earliest youth: he once told me that even as a child he had dreamt of him. At different periods in his life, he would call this haunter of his dreams by different names; “but in the end,” he declares in a note on the subject, “I had to do a PERSIAN the honour of identifying him with this creature of my fancy. Persians were the first to take a broad and comprehensive view of history. Every series of evolutions, according to them, was presided over by a prophet; and every prophet had his ‘Hazar,’—his dynasty of a thousand years.” All Zarathustra’s views, as also his personality, were early conceptions of my brother’s mind. Whoever reads his posthumously published writings for the years 1869-82 with care, will constantly meet with passages suggestive of Zarathustra’s thoughts and doctrines.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain.