Chapter 26 The first love neighbor

You are busy befriending your neighbors, and you use beautiful words for this.But I tell you: your love for your neighbor is only your false self-love. You visit your neighbors to escape yourself, and you want to regard loving your neighbors as a kind of morality: but I see through your "altruism". "You" are older than "I"; "You" are sanctified, but "I" never: So a man is busy befriending his neighbor. Do I advise you to love your neighbor?Rather, I advise you to avoid your neighbor and love the one far away! Love the man who is far away, and the one who comes, is higher than the love of the neighbor; I think that the love of things and phantoms is higher than the love of human beings.

My brother, this phantom that walks before you is beautiful to you; why don't you give it your flesh and bones?But you are afraid, and you run away to the next door. You cannot bear yourselves, you do not love yourselves very much: so you try to tempt your neighbor with love, and cover yourself with his faults. I hope you cannot bear any neighbor to neighbor's neighbor; then you will have to create yourself a friend and his overflowing heart. When you want to praise yourselves, call a witness; if you can entice him to praise you in his heart, praise yourselves in your heart. Liars are not only those who pretend not to know, especially those who pretend to know what they don’t know.You speak thus of yourself in society, and deceive your neighbours.

Says the madman: "The intercourse of crowds impairs a man's character, especially in a man who has no character at all." This person went to the neighbor's house with the purpose of finding himself.The man went to the neighbor's house in order to forget himself.Your false self-love makes your solitude a prison. People far away pay a heavy price for your love for neighbors; when you are already five people together, there is often a sixth person who will die. I also don't like your festivals: I find too many actors, even the audience acts like actors. I don't teach you to love your neighbors but to make friends.Let friends be your earthly festivals and superhuman premonitions.

I teach you my friend and his overflowing heart.If you want to be loved with overflowing hearts, you should know how to be sponges. I teach you as friends who hide the finished world, the shell of goodness,— This creative friend often presents a completed world. The world unfolded for him and rolled up again.Like the evolution from evil to good, from accident to purpose. Let the future and the farthest be your motives for this day: you should love the superman in your friends as your raison d'être. Brothers, I do not advise you to love your neighbor: I advise you to love your neighbor.

Thus spake Zarathustra.