A recent publication from Paris, titled L'Année Merveilleuse (1748), predicts, for the first of next month, a very considerable c...hange: nothing less than the total and reciprocal metamorphosis of the two sexes. Sceptic that I am, I find it difficult to believe, though I would agree to it on one condition, that you and I exchange with each other. While it is true that you would lose greatly by the exchange, it is also true that I would gain a great deal from it, and in the essential things. Who care what their friends lose so long as they profit themselves?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I am a little world made cunningly Of elements, and an angelic sprite;... But black sin hath betrayed to endless night My world's both parts, and Oh! both parts must die.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
But I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes. I do not mind at all. ...I do not belong to the sobbing school of negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal.... No, I do not weep at the world--I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Though I am young and cannot tell Either what death or love is well,... Yet I have heard they both bear darts, And both do aim at human hearts: And then again, I have been told, Love wounds with heat, as death with cold;LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I know my fate. One day my name will be tied to the memory of something monstrous--a crisis without equal on earth, the most profo...und collision of conscience, a decision invoked against everything that had previously been believed, demanded, sanctified. I am no man, I am dynamite!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I have not been asked, as I should have been asked, what the name of Zarathustra means in my mouth, the mouth of the first immoral...ist: for what constitutes the tremendous historical uniqueness of that Persian is just the opposite of this. Zarathustra was the first to consider the struggle between good and evil as the very wheel in the machinery of things: a translation of morals into the metaphysical, as force, cause, and end-in-itself, is his work. But this question itself is at bottom its own answer. Zarathustra created this most calamitous error, morality: as a result, he must also be the first to recognize it. Not only has he more experience in this matter, for a longer time, than any other thinker--all history is after all the refutation by experiment of the principle of this so-called "moral world order"Mwhat is more important is that Zarathustra is more truthful than any other thinker. His doctrine, and his alone, posits truthfulness as the supreme virtue--this means exactly the opposite of the cowardice of the "idealist" who flees from reality; Zarathustra has more intestinal fortitude than all other thinkers put together. To speak the truth and to shoot well with arrows, that is Persian virtue.--Am I understood?--The self- overcoming of morality, out of truthfulness, the self-overcoming of the moralist, into his opposite--into me--that is what the name of Zarathustra means in my mouth.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »