Tragedy is dead! Poetry itself died with it! Away, away with you, puny, stunted imitators! Away with you to Hades, and eat your fill of the old masters' crumbs!
But like infection is the petty thought: it creeps and hides, and wants to be nowhere--until the whole body is decayed and withered by the petty infection... Thus spoke Zarathustra.
"God", "immortality of the soul", "redemption", "beyond" - Without exception, concepts to which I have never devoted any attention, or time; not even as a child. Perhaps I have never been childlike enough for them?
I do not by any means know atheism as a result; even less as an event: It is a matter of course with me, from instinct. I am too inquisitive, too questionable, too exuberant to stand for any gross answer. God is a gross answer, an indelicacy against us thinkers - at bottom merely a gross prohibition for us: you shall not think!
Mankind must work continually to produce individual great human beings - this and nothing else is the task... for the question is this : How can your life, the individual life, retain the highest value, the deepest significance? Only by living for the good of the rarest and most valuable specimens.
One who is publicly honest about himself ends up by priding himself somewhat on this honesty: for he knows only too well why he is honest-for the same reasons another person prefers illusion and dissimulation.