For the new year. – I'm still alive; I still think: I must still be alive because I still have to think. Sum, ergo cogito: cogito, ergo sum. Today everyone allows himself to express his dearest wish and thoughts: so I, too, want to say what I wish from myself today and what thought first crossed my heart – what thought shall be the reason, warrant, and sweetness of the rest of my life! I want to learn more and more how to see what is necessary in things as what is beautiful in them – thus I will be one of those who make things beautiful. Amor fatr: let that be my love from now on! I do not want to wage war against ugliness. I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse the accusers. Let looking away be my only negation! And, all in all and on the whole: some day I want only to be a Yes-sayer!

To the realists. – You sober people who feel armed against passion and phantastical conceptions and would like to make your emptiness a matter of pride and an ornament – you call yourself realists and insinuate that the world really is the way it appears to you: before you alone reality stands unveiled, and you yourselves are perhaps the best part of it – oh, you beloved images of Sais! But aren't you too in your unveiled condition still most passionate and dark creatures, compared to fish, and still all too similar to an artist in love? And what is ‘reality’ to an artist in love! You still carry around the valuations of things that originate in the passions and loves of former centuries! Your sobriety still contains a secret and inextirpable drunkenness! Your love of ‘reality’, for example – oh, that is an old, ancient ‘love’! In every experience, in every sense impression there is a piece of this old love; and some fantasy, some prejudice, some irrationality, some ignorance, some fear, and whatever else, has worked on and contributed to it. That mountain over there! That cloud over there! What is ‘real’ about that? Subtract just once the phantasm and the whole human contribution from it, you sober ones! Yes, if you could do that! If you could forget your background, your past, your nursery school – all of your humanity and animality!

To Goethe

The ever-enduring

is merely your parable!

God the all-blurring

your fiction unbearable…

World-wheel, the turning one

spawns goals each day:

Fate – sighs the yearning one,

the fool calls it – play.

World-play, the ruling one,

blends truth and tricks: –

The eternally fooling one

blends us – in the mix!…

Poet's Calling

Stopped to rest one day, while walking,

seated under shady trees,

when I heard a ticking locking

dainty rhythm on the breeze.

I grew angry – made some faces –

but I lost my anger quick

and, as if in poet's paces,

started speaking tick tock tick.

As I sat, my verses making,

syllables and sounds did pour,

till I burst out laughing, shaking

for a quarter hour or more.

You a poet? You a poet?

Is your mind no longer good?

‘Yes, my man, you are a poet’

shrugs the pecker in the wood.

Whom do I await in bushes?

Whom do I, a robber, stalk?

Proverb? Image? My rhyme rushes

after it and makes it talk.

Anything that moves, you know it

serves to fuel my poet's mood.

‘Yes, my man, you are a poet’

shrugs the pecker in the wood.

Rhymes, I think, must be like arrows:

when they pierce the lizard's heart,

how he twitches, how it harrows,

how he leaps in fits and starts!

Wretched creatures, full of woe, it

kills you or it boils your blood!

‘Yes, my man, you are a poet’

shrugs the pecker in the wood.

The teachers of the purpose of existence. – Whether I regard human beings with a good or with an evil eye, I always find them engaged in a single task, each and every one of them: to do what benefits the preservation of the human race. Not from a feeling of love for the race, but simply because within them nothing is older, stronger, more inexorable and invincible than this instinct – because this instinct constitutes the essence of our species and herd. One might quickly enough, with the usual myopia from five steps away, divide one's neighbours into useful and harmful, good and evil; but on a large-scale assessment, upon further reflection on the whole, one grows suspicious of this tidying and separating and finally abandons it. Even the most harmful person may actually be the most useful when it comes to the preservation of the species; for he nurtures in himself or through his effects on others drives without which humanity would long since have become feeble or rotten. Hatred, delight in the misfortunes of others, the lust to rob and rule, and whatever else is called evil: all belong to the amazing economy of the preservation of the species, an economy which is certainly costly, wasteful, and on the whole most foolish – but still proven to have preserved our race so far. I no longer know whether you, my dear fellow man and neighbour, are even capable of living in a way which is damaging to the species, i.e. ‘unreasonably’ and ‘badly’.

Preface to the second edition

This book might need more than one preface; and in the end there would still be room for doubting whether someone who has not experienced something similar could, by means of prefaces, be brought closer to the experiences of this book. It seems to be written in the language of the wind that brings a thaw: it contains high spirits, unrest, contradiction, and April weather, so that one is constantly reminded of winter's nearness as well as of the triumph over winter that is coming, must come, perhaps has already come…Gratitude flows forth incessantly, as if that which was most unexpected had just happened – the gratitude of a convalescent – for recovery was what was most unexpected. ‘Gay Science’: this signifies the saturnalia of a mind that has patiently resisted a terrible, long pressure – patiently, severely, coldly, without yielding, but also without hope – and is now all of a sudden attacked by hope, by hope for health, by the intoxication of recovery. Is it any wonder that in the process much that is unreasonable and foolish comes to light, much wanton tenderness, lavished even on problems that have a prickly hide, not made to be fondled and lured?

The Gay Science is a remarkable book, both in itself and as offering a way into some of Nietzsche's most important ideas. The history of its publication is rather complex, and it throws some light on the development of his thought and of his methods as a writer. He published the first edition of it in 1882. In that version, it consisted of only four books, and had no Preface, though it did have the ‘Prelude in Rhymes’. A second edition appeared in 1887, which added a fifth book, the Preface, and an Appendix of further poems. This is the work as we now know it, and which is translated here.

Between the two editions of The Gay Science, Nietzsche wrote two of his best-known works, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883–5) and Beyond Good and Evil (1886); the last section of Book Four of The Gay Science (342) is indeed virtually the same as the first section of Zarathustra. So the complete Gay Science brackets these two books, which are different from it and from each other. (Zarathustra, which is a peculiar literary experiment in a rhetoric drawn from the Bible, was once one of Nietzsche's most popular works, but it has worn less well than the others.) Book Five of The Gay Science anticipates, in turn, some of the themes of another famous book which was to follow in 1887, On the Genealogy of Morality, which is again different in tone, sustaining a more continuous theoretical argument.

New battles. – After Buddha was dead, they still showed his shadow in a cave for centuries – a tremendous, gruesome shadow. God is dead; but given the way people are, there may still for millennia be caves in which they show his shadow. – And we – we must still defeat his shadow as well!

Let us beware. – Let us beware of thinking that the world is a living being. Where would it stretch? What would it feed on? How could it grow and procreate? After all, we know roughly what the organic is; are we then supposed to reinterpret what is inexpressibly derivative, late, rare, accidental, which we perceive only on the crust of the earth, as something essential, common, and eternal, as those people do who call the universe an organism? This nauseates me. Let us beware even of believing that the universe is a machine; it is certainly not constructed to one end, and the word ‘machine’ pays it far too high an honour. Let us beware of assuming in general and everywhere anything as elegant as the cyclical movements of our neighbouring stars; even a glance at the Milky Way raises doubts whether there are not much coarser and more contradictory movements there, as well as stars with eternally linear paths, etc. The astral order in which we live is an exception; this order and the considerable duration that is conditioned by it have again made possible the exception of exceptions: the development of the organic.

Invitation

Dare to taste my fare, dear diner!

Come tomorrow it tastes finer

and day after even good!

If you still want more – I'll make it,

from past inspiration take it,

turning food for thought to food.

My Happiness

Since I grew weary of the search

I taught myself to find instead.

Since cross winds caused my ship to lurch

I sail with all winds straight ahead.

Undaunted

Where you stand, there dig deep!

Below you lies the well!

Let obscurantists wail and weep:

‘Below is always – hell!’

Dialogue

A. Was I ill? Have I recovered?

Has my doctor been discovered?

How have I forgotten all?

B. Now I know you have recovered:

Healthy is who can't recall.

To the Virtuous

Our virtues too should step lively to and fro:

Like the verses of Homer, they have to come and go!

Worldly Wisdom

Stay not where the lowlands are!

Climb not into the sky!

The world looks best by far

when viewed from halfway high.

Vademecum – Vadetecum

My way and language speak to you,

you follow me, pursue me too?

To thine own self and way be true:

Thus follow me, but gently do!

On the Third Shedding

Already cracks and breaks my skin,

my appetite unslaking

is fuelled by earth I've taken in:

This snake for earth is aching.

Among the stones and grass I wear

a path from fen to firth,

to eat what's always been my fare

you, my snake food, you my earth.

How to understand our cheerfulness. – The greatest recent event – that ‘God is dead’; that the belief in the Christian God has become unbelievable – is already starting to cast its first shadow over Europe. To those few at least whose eyes – or the suspicion in whose eyes is strong and subtle enough for this spectacle, some kind of sun seems to have set; some old deep trust turned into doubt: to them, our world must appear more autumnal, more mistrustful, stranger, ‘older’. But in the main one might say: for many people's power of comprehension, the event is itself far too great, distant, and out of the way even for its tidings to be thought of as having arrived yet. Even less may one suppose many to know at all what this event really means – and, now that this faith has been undermined, how much must collapse because it was built on this faith, leaned on it, had grown into it – for example, our entire European morality. This long, dense succession of demolition, destruction, downfall, upheaval that now stands ahead: who would guess enough of it today to play the teacher and herald of this monstrous logic of horror, the prophet of deep darkness and an eclipse of the sun the like of which has probably never before existed on earth?

For helpful comments on the Introduction and notes I am very grateful to Desmond Clarke, Hilary Gaskin, Raphael Woolf, Daniel Russell and Alison Futrell. I am especially grateful to Alison Futrell, my colleague in Roman History, for help with a number of Roman issues, from the Voconian law to the excess, in this work, of members of the Licinius Crassus family called Marcus. I also owe thanks to all the students, graduate and undergraduate, to whom I have taught this work in my courses on ancient ethics, and who have helped me come to see the difficulties it presents for a modern reader. I am grateful for the work of scholars who have, in the last decades, produced new translations of important texts from the Hellenistic or post-Aristotelian period of ancient philosophy, and have helped in the process of making the theories of the Stoics, Epicureans and even eclectics like Antiochus part of the normal syllabus in ancient philosophy. I hope that this new translation and edition will make Cicero's text more accessible to a wide audience interested in ancient ethics.

It has been a pleasure to work with Raphael Woolf, who has produced a translation which is not only philosophically accurate but also stylish in Cicero's manner without expanding the English to twice the length of the Latin.