To all those belauded sages of the academic chairs, wisdom was sleep
without dreams: they knew no higher significance of life.

Even at present, to be sure, there are some like this preacher of virtue,
and not always so honourable: but their time is past. And not much longer
do they stand: there they already lie.

Blessed are those drowsy ones: for they shall soon nod to sleep.--

Thus spake Zarathustra.


III. BACKWORLDSMEN.

Once on a time, Zarathustra also cast his fancy beyond man, like all
backworldsmen. The work of a suffering and tortured God, did the world
then seem to me.

The dream--and diction--of a God, did the world then seem to me; coloured
vapours before the eyes of a divinely dissatisfied one.

Good and evil, and joy and woe, and I and thou--coloured vapours did they
seem to me before creative eyes. The creator wished to look away from
himself,--thereupon he created the world.

Intoxicating joy is it for the sufferer to look away from his suffering and
forget himself. Intoxicating joy and self-forgetting, did the world once
seem to me.

This world, the eternally imperfect, an eternal contradiction's image and