favourite spook book passages? I'll start us off:

"Man is his goal, his ought, his destiny, calling, task, his — ideal; he is to himself a future, otherworldly he. And what makes a “proper fellow” of him? Being true, being good, being moral, etc. Now he looks askance at every one who does not recognize the same “what,” seek the same morality, have the same faith, he chases out “separatists, heretics, sects,” etc.

No sheep, no dog, exerts itself to become a “proper sheep, a proper dog”; no beast has its essence appear to it as a task, i.e. as a concept that it has to realize. It realizes itself in living itself out, in dissolving itself, passing away. It does not ask to be or to become anything other than it is.

Do I mean to advise you to be like the beasts? That you ought to become beasts is an exhortation which I certainly cannot give you, as that would again be a task, an ideal (“How doth the little busy bee improve each shining hour. In works of labor or of skill I would be busy too, for Satan finds some mischief still for idle hands to do”). It would be the same, too, as if one wished for the beasts that they should become human beings. Your nature is, once for all, a human one; you are human natures, human beings. But, just because you already are so, you do not still need to become so. Beasts too are “trained,” and a trained beast executes many unnatural things. But a trained dog is no better for itself than a natural one, and has no profit from it, even if it is more companionable for us."