wing virtue is the highest virtue.

Verily, I divine you well, my disciples: ye strive like me for the
bestowing virtue. What should ye have in common with cats and wolves?

It is your thirst to become sacrifices and gifts yourselves: and
therefore have ye the thirst to accumulate all riches in your soul.

Insatiably striveth your soul for treasures and jewels, because your
virtue is insatiable in desiring to bestow.

Ye constrain all things to flow towards you and into you, so that they
shall flow back again out of your fountain as the gifts of your love.

Verily, an appropriator of all values must such bestowing love become;
but healthy and holy, call I this selfishness.--

Another selfishness is there, an all-too-poor and hungry kind, which
would always steal--the selfishness of the sick, the sickly selfishness.

With the eye of the thief it looketh upon all that is lustrous; with the
craving of hunger it measureth him who hath abundance; and ever doth it
prowl round the tables of bestowers.

Sickness speaketh in such craving, and invisible degeneration; of a
sickly body, speaketh the larcenous craving of this selfishness.

Tell me, my brother, what do we think bad, and worst of all? Is it not
DEGENERATION?--And we always suspect degeneration when the bestowing
soul is lacking.

Upward goeth our course from genera on to super-genera. But a horror to
us is the degenerating sense, which saith: "All for myself."

Upward soareth our sense: thus is it a simile of our body, a simile of
an elevation. Such similes of elevations are the names of the virtues.

Thus goeth the body through history, a becomer and fighter. And the
spirit--what is it to the body? Its fights' and victories' herald, its
companion and echo.

Similes, are all names of good and evil; they do not speak out, they
only hint. A fool who seeketh knowledge from them!

Give heed, my brethren, to every hour when your spirit would speak in
similes: there is the origin of your virtue.

Elevated is then your body, and raised up; with its delight, enraptureth
it the spirit; so that it becometh creator, and valuer, and lover, and
everything's benefactor.

When your heart overfloweth broad and full like the river, a blessing
and a danger to the lowlanders: there is the origin of your virtue.

When ye are exalted above praise and blame, and your will would command
all things, as a loving one's will: there is the origin of your virtue.

When ye desp