“The great health. — Being new, nameless, hard to understand, we premature
births of an as yet unproven future need for a new goal also a new means —
namely, a new health, stronger, more seasoned, tougher, more audacious,
and gayer than any previous health. Whoever has a soul that craves to have
experienced the whole range of values and desiderata to date, and to have
sailed around all the coasts of this ideal “mediterranean”; whoever wants
to know from the adventures of his own most authentic experience how a
discoverer and conqueror of the ideal feels, and also an artist, a saint,
a legislator, a sage, a scholar, a pious man, a soothsayer, and one who
stands divinely apart in the old style — needs one thing above everything
else: the great health — that one does not merely have but also acquires
continually, and must acquire because one gives it up again and again,
and must give it up.

And now, after we have long been on our way in this manner, we argonauts
of the ideal, with more daring perhaps than is prudent, and have suffered
shipwreck and damage often enough, but are, to repeat it, healthier than
one likes to permit us, dangerously healthy, ever again healthy — it
will seem to us as if, as a reward, we now confronted an as yet undiscovered
country whose boundaries nobody has surveyed yet, something beyond all
the lands and nooks of the ideals so far, a world so overrich in what is
beautiful, strange, questionable, terrible, and divine that our curiosity
as well as our craving to possess it has gotten beside itself — alas, now
nothing will sate us any more!

After such vistas and with such a burning hunger in our conscience and
science, how could we still be satisfied with present-day man? It may be
too bad but it is inevitable that we find it difficult to remain serious
when we look at his worthiest goals and hopes, and perhaps we do not even
bother to look any more.

Another ideal runs ahead of us, a strange, tempting, dangerous ideal to
which we should not wish to persuade anybody because we do not readily
concede the right to it to anyone: the ideal of a spirit who plays
naively — that is, not deliberately but from overflowing power and
abundance — with all that was hitherto called holy, good, untouchable,
divine; for whom those supreme things that the people naturally accept
as their value standards, signify danger, decay, debasement, or at
least recreation, blindness, and temporary self-oblivion; the ideal
of a human, superhuman well-being and benevolence that will often
appear inhuman — for example, when it confronts all earthly seriousness
so far, all solemnity in gesture, word, tone, eye, morality, and
task so far, as if it were their most incarnate and involuntary
parody — and in spite of all this, it is perhaps only with him that
great seriousness really begins, that the real question mark is posed
for the first time, that the destiny of the soul changes, the hand moves
forward, the tragedy begins”