Chapter 15 The first joy and enthusiasm

My brother, if you have a morality and it is your own, you must not share it with anyone else. Naturally, you want to give it a good name and caress it; you want to lift its ears and play games with it. But look!Once it gets the name you gave it, and the masses share it, then you will become one of the masses and ordinary people because of this morality! You should rather say: "That which sweetens my soul is unspeakable; that which starves my heart is nameless." Let your morals be too noble to be called intimacy: if you must read it, you need not be ashamed, and you may as well say it regularly.

You can chuckle and say, "This is the good that I cherish, it pleases me so much, and it is the good that I need. I need it not because it is God's law, or human regulation, or human necessity: it is never a guide to another world or to heaven. I love it as an earthly morality: it has not much wisdom, and much less reason. But the bird built his nest beside me: so I loved him tenderly—and now he is in my house with his golden eggs. " You should speak and extol your virtues thus periodically. Once you had many passions, and you called them evil.But now you have only your morals, which were born from passion.

You have placed your highest purpose in these passions: so they have become your virtues and pleasures. Even if you belong to the race of the angry, the carnal, the indulgent, or the vengeful: When all your passions will finally become morality; all your devils will finally become angels. There were many wild dogs in your cellar; but now they are birds and beautiful singers. Out of your poison you made your analgesic; you milked the cow of pain, - now you drink the sweet liquid. No more evil will be born in you, except the evil produced by the struggle of multiple moralities. My brother, if you are lucky, you need only have one morality, and not more than one: it will be easier for you to cross the bridge.

It is a beautiful thing to have multiple morals, but it is a more unbearable fate; many people, because they cannot be used as a battlefield for multiple morals, go to the desert to commit suicide. My brother, is war evil?This is a necessary evil; envy, slander, and mistrust are also necessary in your many virtues. look!What is the most coveted thing of every morality: it wants your whole spirit as its precursor, it needs all your strength in love, hatred and anger. Morals are jealous of each other, and jealousy is terrible.Many kinds of morality can be killed by envy. A man surrounded by the flames of jealousy, like a scorpion, finally turns on himself with a poisonous sting.

Alas, my brother, have you never seen a moral self-slander and suicide? Humans are to be surpassed: so cherish your morality:— Because you can die from it. Thus spake Zarathustra.