Thus Spake Zarathustra · Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
2.
Voluptuousness: unto all hair-shirted despisers of the body, a sting and stake; and, cursed as “the world,” by all backworldsmen: for it mocketh and befooleth all erring, misinferring teachers. Voluptuousness: to the rabble, the slow fire at which it is burnt; to all wormy wood, to all stinking rags, the prepared heat and stew furnace. Voluptuousness: to free hearts, a thing innocent and free, the garden-happiness of the earth, all the future’s thanks-overflow to the present. Voluptuousness: only to the withered a sweet poison; to the lion-willed, however, the great cordial, and the reverently saved wine of wines. 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.
Whether they be servile before Gods and divine spurnings, or before men and stupid human opinions: at ALL kinds of slaves doth it spit, this blessed selfishness! Bad: thus doth it call all that is spirit-broken, and sordidly-servile—constrained, blinking eyes, depressed hearts, and the false submissive style, which kisseth with broad cowardly lips. And spurious wisdom: so doth it call all the wit that slaves, and hoary-headed and weary ones affect; and especially all the cunning, spurious-witted, curious-witted foolishness of priests! The spurious wise, however, all the priests, the world-weary, and those whose souls are of feminine and servile nature—oh, how hath their game all along abused selfishness! And precisely THAT was to be virtue and was to be called virtue—to abuse selfishness! And “selfless”—so did they wish themselves with good reason, all those world-weary cowards and cross-spiders! But to all those cometh now the day, the change, the sword of judgment, THE GREAT NOONTIDE: then shall many things be revealed! And he who proclaimeth the EGO wholesome and holy, and selfishness blessed, verily, he, the prognosticator, speaketh also what he knoweth: “BEHOLD, IT COMETH, IT IS NIGH, THE GREAT NOONTIDE!” Thus spake Zarathustra.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.