Thus Spoke Zarathustra

it? — For the present, for very few, — for far fewer than the best philanthropist might assume. What has been written about him so far shows at least that most consider themselves not called, that they cannot keep up, are not allowed to keep up, and must exclude themselves. So it is cheap and natural for now. After all, Nietzsche stands in the sharpest contrast to our time, to all its softness, lukewarmness, yielding nature, lustfulness, petty-malicious, and man-crumbling character. A time in which it is considered the greatest virtue to lose oneself, to lose oneself to others (and indeed not to higher ones, but to lower, suffering ones), must necessarily lower the human being potentially. That things would be better if everyone started with themselves, and not with the other — no one wants to admit that theoretically anymore. It becomes ever truer what Goethe shouted out upon the appearance of the third part of Herder's "Ideas": "If this kind of humanity triumphs, then, I fear, the world will finally be a great hospital, and each the other's humane nurse!" (Naples, May 27, 1787.) Nietzsche, whose age shows the consequences of this humanistic deception far more distinctly than Goethe's, heard nothing in the preaching of that humanity (of pity) other than the sermon of death, the life-murdering tendency of asceticism. Translated into strict and blunt terms, it reads: "As long as there are still suffering beings on earth, the healthy, the joyful, the victorious must likewise suffer, be suppressed — feel pity. Nothing undermines life-force more securely than pity; it gnaws with sharper teeth than suffering. If things are to move quickly forward with coddling and nervous collapse, then the sum of suffering in the world must not remain simple: it must be multiplied a thousandfold — through pity! And even if it is true that nothing can be changed about the suffering itself through pity, or only in the crudest cases, there nevertheless arises on the part of the pitying person a diminution of the desire to live, a paralysis of productivity, a longing for another existence, a metaphysical one, through which we first truly become human. Through suffering and pity, we are most similar to the God who became man. — The opposite: that
—man is most similar to the gods in joy and celebration, in the fullness of his strength, in the high feeling of himself — is nothing but Greek barbarism and paganism."

Nietzsche’s warning against pity applies, of course, only to his own.