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Ecce Homo serves as the final prose work of Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche and acts as a comprehensive summary of his character, purpose, and achievements. The text functions as a final self-assessment in which the author evaluates his life and work before his spiritual decline.

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Table of Contents

WHY I WRITE SUCH EXCELLENT BOOKS

"The vastest soul that can run and stray and rove furthest in its own domain,

"The most necessary soul, that out of desire flingeth itself to chance,

"The stable soul that plungeth into Becoming, the possessing soul that must needs taste of willing and longing,

"The soul that flyeth from itself, and over-taketh itself in the widest circle,

"The wisest soul that folly exhorteth most sweetly,

"The most self-loving soul, in whom all things have their rise, their ebb and flow."

But this is the very idea of Dionysus. Another consideration leads to this idea. The psychological problem presented by the type of Zarathustra is, how can he, who in an unprecedented manner says no, and acts no, in regard to all that which has been affirmed hitherto, remain nevertheless a yea-saying spirit? how can he who bears the heaviest destiny on his shoulders and whose very life-task is a fatality, yet be the brightest and the most transcendental of spirits—for Zarathustra is a dancer? how can he who has the hardest and most terrible grasp of reality, and who has thought the most "abysmal thoughts," nevertheless avoid conceiving these things as objections to existence, or even as objections to the eternal recurrence of existence?—how is it that on the contrary he finds reasons for being himself the eternal affirmation of all things, "the tremendous and unlimited saying of Yea and Amen"?... "Into every abyss do I bear the benediction of my yea to Life." ... But this, once more, is precisely the idea of Dionysus.

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