Thus Spoke Zarathustra
A Book for All and None
Friedrich Nietzsche 1883
A wandering teacher named Zarathustra questions human values through speeches, stories, and songs. His first public speech unfolds before a crowd waiting to watch a tightrope walker.
416 pages 8h 4m reading time
- Nietzsche's most famous book, and one of the most widely read works of modern philosophy.
- Argues that, with the old belief in God fading ("God is dead"), people must create their own values instead of following inherited rules.
- Imagines the "Übermensch" (often translated "Superman" or "Overman"), a higher kind of person who lives boldly by values of their own making.
- Inspired Richard Strauss's 1896 orchestral piece of the same name, whose opening later became famous through the film "2001: A Space Odyssey."
- Shaped later thinkers and writers, from philosophers who asked how to live a meaningful life without fixed answers to novelists like Hermann Hesse.
Idea came on a walk
The central idea struck Nietzsche in 1881 beside a large rock on a lakeside walk in the Swiss Alps.
Written in bursts
Nietzsche said he wrote each of the first three parts in only about ten days.
Hardly anyone bought it
Early sales were tiny, and Nietzsche complained his publisher cared more about printing hateful anti-Jewish pamphlets.
A secret final part
Nietzsche paid to print about forty copies of the fourth part himself and gave only a few away.
Translated from German by Thomas Common 1909
From the 1909 Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche