But now doth your emasculated ogling profess to be ‘contemplation’! And that which can be examined with cowardly eyes is to be christened ‘beautiful’! Oh, ye violators of noble names!

But it shall be your curse, ye immaculate ones, ye pure discerners, that ye shall never bring forth, even though ye lie broad and teeming on the horizon!

Verily, ye fill your mouth with noble words; and we are to believe that your heart overfloweth, ye cozeners?

But my words are poor, contemptible, stammering words; gladly do I pick up what falleth from the table at your repasts.

Yet still can I say therewith the truth—to dissemblers! Yea, my fish-bones, shells and prickly leaves shall—tickle the noses of dissemblers!

Bad air is always about you and your repasts; your lascivious thoughts, your lies and secrets are indeed in the air!

Dare only to believe in yourselves—in yourselves and in your inward parts! He who doth not believe in himself always lieth.

A God’s mask have ye hung in front of you, ye ‘pure ones’; into a God’s mask hath your execrable coiling snake crawled.

Verily ye deceive, ye ‘contemplative ones’! Even Zarathustra was once the dupe of your godlike exterior; he did not divine the serpent’s coil with which it was stuffed.

A God’s soul I once thought I saw playing in your games, ye pure discerners! No better arts did I once dream of than your arts!

Serpents’ filth and evil odour, the distance concealed from me; and that a lizard’s craft prowled thereabouts lasciviously.

But I came nigh unto you; then came to me the day—and now cometh it to you—at an end is the moon’s love affair!

See there! Surprised and pale doth it stand—before the rosy dawn!

For already she cometh, the glowing one—her love to the earth cometh! Innocence and creative desire is all solar love!

See there, how she cometh impatiently over the sea! Do ye not feel the thirst and the hot breath of her love?

At the sea would she suck, and drink its depths to her height: now riseth the desire of the sea with its thousand breasts.

Kissed and sucked would it be by the thirst of the sun; vapour would it become, and height, and path of light, and light itself!

Verily, like the sun do I love life, and all deep seas.

And this meaneth to me knowledge: all that is deep shall ascend— to my height!

Thus spake Zarathustra.