Thus Spake Zarathustra · Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
6.
Ye higher men, think ye that I am here to put right what ye have put wrong? Or that I wished henceforth to make snugger couches for you sufferers? Or show you restless, miswandering, misclimbing ones, new and easier footpaths? Nay! Nay! Three times Nay! Always more, always better ones of your type shall succumb,—for ye shall always have it worse and harder. Thus only— —Thus only groweth man aloft to the height where the lightning striketh and shattereth him: high enough for the lightning! Towards the few, the long, the remote go forth my soul and my seeking: of what account to me are your many little, short miseries! Ye do not yet suffer enough for me! For ye suffer from yourselves, ye have not yet suffered FROM MAN. Ye would lie if ye spake otherwise! None of you suffereth from what _I_ have suffered.— It is not enough for me that the lightning no longer doeth harm. I do not wish to conduct it away: it shall learn—to work for ME.— My wisdom hath accumulated long like a cloud, it becometh stiller and darker. So doeth all wisdom which shall one day bear LIGHTNINGS.— Unto these men of to-day will I not be LIGHT, nor be called light. THEM—will I blind: lightning of my wisdom! put out their eyes!
Do not will anything beyond your power: there is a bad falseness in those who will beyond their power. Especially when they will great things! For they awaken distrust in great things, these subtle false-coiners and stage-players:— —Until at last they are false towards themselves, squint-eyed, whited cankers, glossed over with strong words, parade virtues and brilliant false deeds. Take good care there, ye higher men! For nothing is more precious to me, and rarer, than honesty. Is this to-day not that of the populace? The populace however knoweth not what is great and what is small, what is straight and what is honest: it is innocently crooked, it ever lieth.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.