Creating Your Own Meaning — Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Zarathustra says ripe figs fall sweet in autumn, and his teachings fall now for his friends. He once taught people to say God when they looked at distant seas. Now he teaches them to say Superman.

Do not conjecture beyond your power to create. Could you create a God? Be silent about gods and become forefathers of the Superman. The world you call real must be shaped by your reason, will, and love. He says there are no gods because he could not endure not being one himself.

Creating is salvation from suffering, but it costs bitter deaths and many transformations. He has passed through a hundred souls. His hammer breaks the stone hiding the image of the Superman. Of what account now are the gods to him? God as thought makes everything reel. He praises becoming and perishableness. Willing emancipates. Feeling suffers in prison until will frees it. The creator must bear birth-pangs to bring forth the new. Vertigo of eternal things is vomiting to the stomach; he chooses the hammer instead. He walked through a hundred cradles and farewell hours so his creating will could shape what comes next for mankind. Imperishable things are only similes; poets lie too much about them.