Friedrich Nietzsche: Thus Spake Zarathustra

THIRD PART. 56. LVI. OLD AND NEW TABLES. (continued)

--Or was it a sermon of death that called holy what contradicted and dissuaded from life?--O my brethren, break up, break up for me the old tables!

11.

It is my sympathy with all the past that I see it is abandoned,--

--Abandoned to the favour, the spirit and the madness of every generation that cometh, and reinterpreteth all that hath been as its bridge!

A great potentate might arise, an artful prodigy, who with approval and disapproval could strain and constrain all the past, until it became for him a bridge, a harbinger, a herald, and a cock-crowing.

This however is the other danger, and mine other sympathy:--he who is of the populace, his thoughts go back to his grandfather,--with his grandfather, however, doth time cease.

Thus is all the past abandoned: for it might some day happen for the populace to become master, and drown all time in shallow waters.

Therefore, O my brethren, a NEW NOBILITY is needed, which shall be the adversary of all populace and potentate rule, and shall inscribe anew the word "noble" on new tables.

For many noble ones are needed, and many kinds of noble ones, FOR A NEW NOBILITY! Or, as I once said in parable: "That is just divinity, that there are Gods, but no God!"

12.

O my brethren, I consecrate you and point you to a new nobility: ye shall become procreators and cultivators and sowers of the future;--

--Verily, not to a nobility which ye could purchase like traders with traders' gold; for little worth is all that hath its price.

Let it not be your honour henceforth whence ye come, but whither ye go! Your Will and your feet which seek to surpass you--let these be your new honour!