The New Tables of Values — Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Zarathustra sits in his cave surrounded by broken old tablets and new ones only half written. He waits for a sign, a laughing lion with a flock of doves, before he goes down to people one last time. While he waits, he tells himself his own story and remembers what he taught before: that no one truly knows good and evil except the person who creates new goals for mankind.

He says people sleep on old ideas of good and evil as if they already know the answers. He calls for smashing worn moral rules, laughing at tired saints and moralists, and building a new nobility based on where you are going, not your family name. He warns against parasites who feed on strong souls, lazy world-weariness, and traders who pick profit from rubbish. Most of all he warns against so-called good people who crush anyone who writes new values on new tablets.

Through many hard sayings he urges his followers to become hard, like a diamond that can cut old illusions. Life is not a contract or a finished answer. It is an attempt, a long search. He will descend again like a setting sun and give his best gift, but only when the hour is truly his.