There is something truly uncanny about prophetic tidings. Their compelling force seems to have less to do with being bolts from the blue than with their ability to remind us - to make us more mindful - of what we already know, and might have wished for but have by circumstance or choice set aside. The Old Testament vision of a heavenly realm of milk and honey gains its (universal) power not from the paradisiacal ideality it projects but from the way it forces us to confront the violence, estrangement and disappointments of ordinary experience, and our only-too- human longing for something different or redemptive.
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This astonishing series of aphorisms, put into the mouth of the Persian sage Zarathustra, or Zoroaster,contains the kernel of Nietzsche's thought. 'God is dead', he tells us. Christianity is decadent, leading mankind into a slave morality concerned not with this life, but with the next. Nietzsche emphasises the Ubermensch, or Superman, whose will to power makes him the creator of a new heroic mentality. The intensely felt ideas are expressed in prose-poetry of indefinable beauty.
Though misused by the German National Socialist party as a spurious justification of their creed, the book also had a profound influence on early twentieth-century writers such as Shaw, Mann, Gide, Lawrence and Sartre. It remains, to this day, a beacon of original thought.
INTRODUCTION
FIRST PART
ZARATHUSTRA'S PROLOGUE
ZARATHUSTRA'S DISCOURSES
The Three Metamorphoses
The Academic Chairs of Virtue
Backworldsinen
The Despisers of the Body
Joys and Passions
The Pale Criminal
Reading and Writing
The Tree on the Hill
The Preacher of Death
War and Warriors
The New Idol
The Flies in the Market-place
Chastity
The Friend
The Thousand and One Goals
Neighbour-love
The Way of the Creating One
Old and Young Women
The Bite of the Adder
Child and Marriage
Voluntary Death
The Bestowing Virtue
SECOND PART
The Child with the Mirror
In the Happy Isles
The Pitiful
The Priests
The Virtuous
The Rabble
The Tarantulas
The Famous Wise Ones
The Night-song
The Dance-song
The Grave-song
Self-surpassing
The Sublime Ones
The Land of Culture
Immaculate Perception
Scholars
Poets
Great Events
The Soothsayer
Redemption
Manly Prudence
The Stillest Hour
THIRD PART
The Wanderer
The Vision and the Enigma
Involuntary Bliss
Before Sunrise
The Bedwarfing Virtue
On The Olive-mount
On Passing-by
The Apostates
The Return Home
The Three Evil Things
The Spirit of Gravity
Old and New Tables
The Convalescent
The Great Longing
The Second Dance-song
The Seven Seals
FOURTH AND LAST PART
The Honey Sacrifice
The Cry of Distress
The Talk with Kings
The Leech
The Magician
Out of Service
The Ugliest Man
The Voluntary Beggar
The Shadow
Noontide
The Greeting
The Supper
The Higher Man
The Song of Melancholy
Science
Among Daughters of the Desert
The Awakening
The Ass-festival
The Drunken Song
The Sign
Bibliography
