Thus Spoke Zarathustra: The Three Metamorphoses

“I name for you three metamorphoses of the spirit: how the spirit becomes a camel, the camel a lion, and the lion at last a child.There are many heavy things for the spirit, the strong spirit that can bear loads and is full of respect, for its strength longs for what is heavy, and for what is heaviest.What is heavy? asks the load-bearing spirit; then it kneels down like the camel and wants to be well loaded.Is it this: to lower oneself in order to hurt one’s pride? To go hungry in the soul for the sake of truth? To love those who despise us?All these heaviest things the spirit takes upon itself, and like a loaded camel that hurries into the desert, it hurries into its own desert.

But in the loneliest desert the second metamorphosis happens: here the spirit becomes a lion. It wants to capture freedom and be master in its own desert.Here it looks for its last master, to fight him; for victory it will struggle with the great dragon.What is the great dragon? Its name is “You shall.” But the spirit of the lion says, “I will.”“You shall” lies in its path, glittering with gold, a beast covered in scales, and on every scale shines in gold: “You shall!” The values of a thousand years glitter on those scales.To create new values, even the lion cannot yet do that. But to create freedom for new creation, that the lion’s power can do: to win freedom, and to say a holy No even to duty.

But tell me, my brothers, what can the child do that even the lion could not? Why must the hunting lion still become a child?The child is innocence and forgetting, a new beginning, a game, a wheel that rolls by itself, a first movement, a holy Yes.For the game of creating, my brothers, a holy Yes to life is needed: now the spirit wills its own will, and the one who was lost to the world wins its own world.”