On the Way of the Creator

Do you want, my brother, to go into isolation? Do you want to seek the way to yourself? Hesitate a little longer and listen to me.

“Whoever seeks easily gets lost himself. All isolation is guilt”: so speaks the herd. And you belonged to the herd for a long time.

The voice of the herd will still sound in you too. And when you say, “I no longer have one conscience with you,” it will be a lament and a pain.

Behold, this pain itself was still born of that one conscience: and that conscience’s last glimmer still glows on your gloom.

But you want to go the way of your gloom, which is the way to yourself? Then show me your right and your strength for it!

Are you a new strength and a new right? A first movement? A wheel rolling out of itself? Can you also compel stars to revolve around you?

Ah, there is so much lusting for the heights! There are so many convulsions of the ambitious! Show me that you are not one of the lustful and the ambitious!

Ah, there are so many great thoughts that do no more than a bellows: they puff up and make emptier.

Free, you call yourself? I want to hear your ruling thought, and not that you have escaped a yoke.

Are you one who was entitled to escape a yoke? There is many a one who threw away his last value when he threw away his servitude.

Free from what? What does Zarathustra care! But your eye shall tell me clearly: free for what?

Can you give yourself your evil and your good and hang your will over yourself like a law? Can you be your own judge and the avenger of your law?

Terrible it is to be alone with the judge and avenger of one’s own law. Thus a star is thrown out into empty space and into the icy breath of being alone.

Today you still suffer from the many, you who are one: today you still have your courage whole, and your hopes.

But one day solitude will make you weary, one day your pride will bend and your courage gnash its teeth. One day you will cry: “I am alone!”

One day you will no longer see your height, and your lowness all too near; your sublimity itself will frighten you like a ghost. One day you will cry: “All is false!”

There are feelings that want to kill the solitary one; if they do not succeed, well, then they themselves must die! But are you capable of that, of being a murderer?

Do you know, my brother, the word “contempt” yet? And the torment of your justice, to be just to those who despise you?

You force many to change their minds about you; they hold that hard against you. You came near them and yet went past: that they never forgive you.

You go beyond them: but the higher you climb, the smaller the eye of envy sees you. But the one who flies is hated most.

“How could you be just to me!—you must say—I choose your injustice as the portion allotted to me.”

Injustice and filth they throw at the solitary one: but, my brother, if you want to be a star, you must shine on them no less for that!

And beware of the good and the just! They like to crucify those who invent their own virtue for themselves,—they hate the solitary one.

Beware too of holy simplicity! Everything that is not simple is unholy to it; it also likes to play with fire—the fire of the stake.

And beware too of the fits of your love! Too quickly the solitary one stretches out his hand to whoever meets him.

To many a human being you may not give your hand, but only your paw: and I want your paw to have claws too.

But the worst enemy you can meet will always be yourself; you yourself lie in wait for yourself in caves and forests.

Solitary one, you are going the way to yourself! And your way leads past yourself and past your seven devils!

You will be a heretic to yourself, and a witch and a soothsayer and a fool and a doubter and an unholy one and a villain.

You must want to burn yourself in your own flame: how could you become new if you had not first become ashes!

Solitary one, you are going the way of the creator: you want to create a god for yourself out of your seven devils!

Solitary one, you are going the way of the lover: you love yourself, and that is why you despise yourself, as only lovers despise.

The lover wants to create because he despises! What does he know of love who did not have to despise precisely what he loved!

Go into your isolation with your love and with your creating, my brother; and only late will justice limp after you.

Go into your isolation with my tears, my brother. I love him who wants to create beyond himself and so perishes.—

Thus spoke Zarathustra.