thus spoke zarathustra translated by walter kaufmann

Zarathustra he was called but he hath altered. 'No stranger to me is this wanderer: many years ago passed he by. And thus spake the old man to Zarathustra: When he entered the forest, however, there suddenly stood before him an old man, who had left his holy cot to seek roots. Zarathustra went down the mountain alone, no one meeting him. Lo! This cup is again going to empty itself, and Zarathustra is again going to be a man. Like thee must I GO DOWN, as men say, to whom I shall descend.īless me, then, thou tranquil eye, that canst behold even the greatest happiness without envy!īless the cup that is about to overflow, that the water may flow golden out of it, and carry everywhere the reflection of thy bliss! Therefore must I descend into the deep: as thou doest in the evening, when thou goest behind the sea, and givest light also to the nether-world, thou exuberant star! I would fain bestow and distribute, until the wise have once more become joyous in their folly, and the poor happy in their riches. Lo! I am weary of my wisdom, like the bee that hath gathered too much honey I need hands outstretched to take it. With blazing intensity and poetic brilliance, Nietzsche argues that the meaning of existence is not to be found in religious pieties or meek submission to authority, but in an all-powerful life force: passionate, chaotic and free.But we awaited thee every morning, took from thee thine overflow and blessed thee for it.

Nietzsche's utterance 'God is dead', his insistence that the meaning of life is to be found in purely human terms, and his doctrine of the Superman and the will to power were all later seized upon and unrecognisably twisted by, among others, Nazi intellectuals. It describes how the ancient Persian prophet Zarathustra descends from his solitude in the mountains to tell the world that God is dead and that the Superman, the human embodiment of divinity, is his successor.

Friedrich Nietzsche's most accessible and influential philosophical work, misquoted, misrepresented, brilliantly original and enormously influential Nietzsche was one of the most revolutionary and subversive thinkers in Western philosophy, and Thus Spoke Zarathustra remains his most famous and influential work.

Thus spoke zarathustra translated by walter kaufmann