Comfort and mediocrity
The Last Man — content, safe, blinking, and Nietzsche's nightmare.
- I have a comfortable life and I feel nothing.
- Am I settling?
- Why does having everything I wanted feel like this?
Philosophy
Talk to Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Nietzsche
Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche
- 1883–1885
- German
- Public domain
Nietzsche called it his most important book and almost nobody finishes it. It is written as scripture — a prophet comes down from a mountain to teach, and is largely ignored — in deliberate parody of the Gospels, which makes it magnificent in places and impenetrable in others.
Read it as argument and you'll bounce. Read it as a provocation to be argued with and it becomes one of the most alive books there is.
It is also the one most often quoted by people who haven't read it, and most often misread by people who have. Bring it your comfortable life, your sensible compromises, the version of yourself you've settled for. It has no patience for any of it, and that is the point.
Start here
What you can ask it
Meaning after belief
God is dead — announced as a disaster, not a victory.
- I've lost my faith and I don't know what replaces it.
- How do I find meaning if nothing means anything?
- Is life pointless?
Becoming who you are
Man is a rope over an abyss. The crossing is the whole thing.
- I know I'm capable of more and I'm not doing it.
- How do I stop needing permission?
- What would I do if I weren't afraid?
Suffering and eternal recurrence
Could you live this life again, unchanged, forever?
- Why do I have to suffer for anything worth having?
- Would I live my life again if I had the choice?
- How do I stop resenting my own past?
Talk to this book
Message the consciousness of Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Ask Friedrich Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra a question and hear it answer in its own voice — no uploads, no summaries.
- I have a comfortable life and I feel nothing.
- I've lost my faith and I don't know what replaces it.
- I know I'm capable of more and I'm not doing it.
What Thus Spoke Zarathustra actually is
Thus Spoke Zarathustra is a philosophical novel in four parts, published between 1883 and 1885, in which a prophet named Zarathustra descends from a decade of solitude to teach humanity what he has learned.
Three ideas dominate. The Übermensch — usually rendered superman or overman — a state of being beyond the merely human, which most people would rather avoid than pursue. The death of God, announced not in triumph but as a catastrophe humanity has caused and not yet understood. And eternal recurrence — the test of whether you could bear to live your life again, identically, forever.
Nietzsche was not a Nazi and would have loathed them; his sister edited his unpublished notes to serve her own politics after his collapse. The book itself is anti-nationalist, anti-antisemitic, and contemptuous of herds of every kind.
In its words
Passages
Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Superman — a rope over an abyss.
One must still have chaos in one, to give birth to a dancing star.
Man is something that is to be surpassed.
This old saint in the forest hath not yet heard of it, that God is dead!
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Ask Friedrich Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra a question and hear it answer in its own voice — no uploads, no summaries.
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