On Love of One’s Neighbor

You crowd around your neighbor and have fine words for it. But I tell you: your love of your neighbor is your bad love of yourselves.

You flee to your neighbor from yourselves and would like to make a virtue of it: but I see through your “selflessness.”

The You is older than the I; the You has been pronounced holy, but not yet the I: so the human being crowds toward the neighbor.

Do I counsel you to love of your neighbor? I would sooner counsel you to flight from the neighbor and to love of the farthest!

Higher than love of the neighbor is love of the farthest and of what is to come; higher still than love of human beings is love of things and of ghosts.

This ghost that runs ahead of you, my brother, is more beautiful than you; why do you not give it your flesh and your bones? But you are afraid and run to your neighbor.

You cannot stand to be with yourselves and do not love yourselves enough: now you want to seduce your neighbor into love and gild yourselves with his error.

I wish you could not stand to be with all sorts of neighbors and their neighbors; then you would have to create your friend and his overflowing heart out of yourselves.

You invite a witness when you want to speak well of yourselves; and when you have seduced him into thinking well of you, you think well of yourselves.

Not only he lies who speaks against his knowledge, but all the more he who speaks against his ignorance. And so you speak of yourselves in company, and with yourselves you lie to your neighbor.

Thus speaks the fool: “Association with human beings spoils the character, especially when one has none.”

One goes to his neighbor because he is seeking himself, and another because he would like to lose himself. Your bad love of yourselves makes a prison of solitude for you.

It is those farther away who pay for your love of the neighbor; and when there are even five of you together, a sixth must always die.

I do not love your festivals either: I found too many actors there, and the spectators, too, often behaved like actors.

I do not teach you the neighbor but the friend. Let the friend be for you the festival of the earth and a foretaste of the Übermensch.

I teach you the friend and his overfull heart. But one must know how to be a sponge if one wants to be loved by overfull hearts.

I teach you the friend in whom the world stands complete, a bowl of the good,—the creating friend, who always has a complete world to give away.

And as the world rolled apart for him, so it rolls together again for him in rings, as the becoming of good through evil, as the becoming of purposes out of chance.

Let the future and the farthest be the cause of your today: in your friend you shall love the Übermensch as your cause.

My brothers, I do not counsel you to love of the neighbor: I counsel you to love of the farthest.

Thus spoke Zarathustra.