Friedrich Nietzsche: Thus Spake Zarathustra

THIRD PART. 54. LIV. THE THREE EVIL THINGS. (continued)

Voluptuousness: the great symbolic happiness of a higher happiness and highest hope. For to many is marriage promised, and more than marriage,--

--To many that are more unknown to each other than man and woman:--and who hath fully understood HOW UNKNOWN to each other are man and woman!

Voluptuousness:--but I will have hedges around my thoughts, and even around my words, lest swine and libertine should break into my gardens!--

Passion for power: the glowing scourge of the hardest of the heart-hard; the cruel torture reserved for the cruellest themselves; the gloomy flame of living pyres.

Passion for power: the wicked gadfly which is mounted on the vainest peoples; the scorner of all uncertain virtue; which rideth on every horse and on every pride.

Passion for power: the earthquake which breaketh and upbreaketh all that is rotten and hollow; the rolling, rumbling, punitive demolisher of whited sepulchres; the flashing interrogative-sign beside premature answers.

Passion for power: before whose glance man creepeth and croucheth and drudgeth, and becometh lower than the serpent and the swine:--until at last great contempt crieth out of him--,

Passion for power: the terrible teacher of great contempt, which preacheth to their face to cities and empires: "Away with thee!"--until a voice crieth out of themselves: "Away with ME!"

Passion for power: which, however, mounteth alluringly even to the pure and lonesome, and up to self-satisfied elevations, glowing like a love that painteth purple felicities alluringly on earthly heavens.

Passion for power: but who would call it PASSION, when the height longeth to stoop for power! Verily, nothing sick or diseased is there in such longing and descending!

That the lonesome height may not for ever remain lonesome and self-sufficing; that the mountains may come to the valleys and the winds of the heights to the plains:--

Oh, who could find the right prenomen and honouring name for such longing! "Bestowing virtue"--thus did Zarathustra once name the unnamable.