He who knows how to breathe in the air of my writings is conscious that it is the air of the heights, that it is bracing. A man must be built for it, otherwise the chances are that it will chill him. The ice is near, the loneliness is terrible--but how serenely everything lies in the sunshine! how freely one can breathe! how much, one feels, lies beneath one! Philosophy, as I have understood it hitherto, is a voluntary retirement into regions of ice and mountain-peaks--the seeking--out of everything strange and questionable in existence, everything upon which, hitherto, morality has set its ban. Through long experience, derived from such wanderings in forbidden country, I acquired an opinion very different from that which may seem generally desirable, of the causes which hitherto have led to men's moralising and idealising. The secret history of philosophers, the psychology of their great names, was revealed to me. How much truth can a certain mind endure; how much truth can it dare?--these questions became for me ever more and more the actual test of values. Error (the belief in the ideal) is not blindness; error is cowardice.... Every conquest, every step forward in knowledge, is the outcome of courage, of hardness towards one's self, of cleanliness towards one's self. I do not refute ideals; all I do is to draw on my gloves in their presence.... _Nitimur in vetitum;_ with this device my philosophy will one day be victorious; for that which has hitherto been most stringently forbidden is, without exception, Truth. 4 In my lifework, my _Zarathustra_ holds a place apart. With it, I gave my fellow-men the greatest gift that has ever been bestowed upon them. This book, the voice of which speaks out across the ages, is not only the loftiest book on earth, literally the book of mountain air,--the whole phenomenon, mankind, lies at an incalculable distance beneath it,--but it is also the deepest book, born of the inmost abundance of truth; an inexhaustible well, into which no pitcher can be lowered without coming up again laden with gold and with goodness. Here it is not a "prophet" who speaks, one of those gruesome hybrids of sickness and Will to Power, whom men call founders of religions. If a man would not do a sad wrong to his wisdom, he must, above all give proper heed to the tones--the halcyonic tones--that fall from the lips of Zarathustra:-- "The most silent words are harbingers of the storm; thoughts that come on dove's feet lead the world. "The figs fall from the trees; they are good and sweet, and, when they fall, their red skins are rent. "A north wind am I unto ripe figs. "Thus, like figs, do these precepts drop down to you, my friends; now drink their juice and their sweet pulp. "It is autumn all around, and clear sky, and afternoon."