He is a very sensitive man. He would like to wait for exactly the right time when he can be heard, when he can be understood. How will he know that the right hour has come?

He has a symbol that will indicate his hour:

Namely, the laughing lion with the flock of doves.

When the lion can laugh with the innocent doves my time has come. When the lion can play with innocent children my time has come. In other words, according to his categories, the camel becomes the lion when he revolts against slavery, and the lion becomes a child when he grows into his innocence.

And unless humanity has become this innocent, it is not possible for Zarathustra to be understood.

Meanwhile, I talk to myself, as one who has plenty of time. No one tells me anything new; so I tell myself to my myself.

He is alone; there is nobody else there in the mountains. He tells things to himself – perhaps just to hear them clearly, because soon he will be saying those things to human beings. He is polishing them, sharpening them, making them more rational, understandable, more human.

When I visited men, I found them sitting upon an old self-conceit. Each one thought he had long since known what was good and evil for man.

This is his first attack on human ideas of morality, of good and evil – that man is…

…sitting upon an old self-conceit.

Everybody thinks that he already knows what is right, what is wrong, what is good, what is evil. You can see it within yourself, and you can see it without you.

You can move around in the world and you will find that everybody is a knower, with no suspicion at all – because those old values have been given to him as a heritage. Each generation goes on giving its diseases to the new generation. They call it wisdom. But what was wisdom yesterday, today is simply nonsense.

If you want your children to be wise, never give them wisdom. If you want your children to have a clarity about life and a spontaneous responsibility towards situations and people, don’t load them with ideas of good and evil, because they will not be living in your time – and you cannot conceive in what time they will be living, what will be their situations.