Something To Ponder

At one time Zarathustra also cast his fancy beyond man, like all the afterworldly. The work of suffering and tortured god, the world seemed to me.
A dream and a fiction of a god the world then seemed to me; colored smoke before the eyes of a dissatisfied deity.
Good and evil and joy and pain and I and you - colored smoke they seemed to me before creative eyes. The creator wanted to look away from himself, so he created the world.
It is drunken joy for the sufferer to look away from his suffering and lose himself. Drunken joy and loss of self, did the world once seem to me.
This world, eternally imperfect, the image of an eternal contradiction, an imperfect image - drunken joy to its imperfect creator: thus did the world once seem to me.
Thus, at one time, I also cast my fancy beyond man, like all afterworldly. Beyond man indeed?
Ah, you brothers, that god whom I created was humanly made madness, like all gods!
Man he was, and only a poor fragment of a man and his "I": out of my own ashes and glow it came to me, that ghost, and truly! It did not come to me from beyond!
What happened, my brothers? I overcame myself, the sufferer; I carried my own ashes to the mountains; I invented a brighter flame for myself. And behold! At that the ghost fled from me!
Now it would be suffering for me and agony for the convalescent to believe in such ghosts: now it would be suffering for me, and humiliation. Thus I speak to the afterworldly.
It was suffering and impotence - that created all afterworlds; and that brief madness of bliss which is experienced only by those who suffer most deeply.

- Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra