Quotes by Friedrich Nietzsche

Convictions are more dangerous foes of truth than lies.

Belief means not wanting to know what is true.

No one dies of fatal truths nowadays: there are too many antidotes.

What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms – in short, a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.

How much truth does a spirit endure, how much truth does it dare?

Truth is a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, anthropomorphisms, in short a sum of human relations which have been subjected to poetic and rhetorical intensification, translation and decoration […]; truths are illusions of which we have forgotten that they are illusions, metaphors which have become worn by frequent use and have lost all sensuous vigour […]. Yet we still do not know where the drive to truth comes from, for so far we have only heard about the obligation to be truthful which society imposes in order to existfrom, On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense.

Nothing is needed more than truth, and in relation to it everything else has only second-rate value.This unconditional will to truth—what is it? Is it the will not to allow oneself to be deceived? Or is it the will not to deceive? For the will to truth could be interpreted in the second way, too—if only the special case I do not want to deceive myself is subsumed under the generalization I do not want to deceive. But why not deceive?But why not allow oneself to be deceived?Note that the reasons for the former principle belong to an altogether different realm from those for the second. One does not want to allow oneself to be deceived because one assumes that it is harmful, dangerous, calamitous to be deceived. In this sense, science would be a long-range prudence, a caution, a utility; but one could object in all fairness: How is that? Is wanting not to allow oneself to be deceived really less harmful, less dangerous, less calamitous? What do you know in advance of the character of existence to be able to decide whether the greater advantage is on the side of the unconditionally mistrustful or of the unconditionally trusting?

There is no pre-established harmony between the furtherance of truth and the well-being of mankind.

Sometimes it is harder to accede to a thing than it is to see its truth.

...inability to lie is still far from being love to truth. Be on your guard! ... He who cannot lie, doth not know what truth is.

Einer hat immer Unrecht: aber mit zweien beginnt die Wahrheit. Einer kann sich nicht beweisen: aber zweie kann man bereits nicht widerlegen.

It was a subtle refinement of God to learn Greek when he wished to write a book – and that he did not learn it better.

Whoever extolleth him as a God of love, doth not think highly enough of love itself. Did not that God want also to be judge? But the loving one loveth irrespective of reward and requital.

New struggles. -- After Buddha was dead, they still showed his shadow in a cave for centuries -- a colossal, horrible shadow. God is dead, but given the way people are, there may still be caves for millennia in which his shadow is displayed. -- And we -- we must still defeat his shadow as well!

Under Christianity neither morality nor religion has any point of contact with actuality. It offers purely imaginary causes (God soul, ego, spirit, free will -- unfree will for that matter), and purely imaginary effects (sin, salvation, grace, punishment, forgiveness of sins). Intercourse between imaginary beings (God, spirits, souls); an imaginary natural science (anthropocentric; a total denial of the concept of natural causes); an imaginary psychology (misunderstandings of self, misinterpretations of agreeable or disagreeable general feelings -- for example, of the states of the nervus sympathicus with the help of the sign-language of religio-ethical balderdash -- , repentance, pangs of conscience, temptation by the devil, the presence of God); an imaginary teleology (the kingdom of God, the last judgment, eternal life). -- This purely fictitious world, greatly to its disadvantage, is to be differentiated from the world of dreams; the later at least reflects reality, whereas the former falsifies it, cheapens it and denies it. Once the concept of nature had been opposed to the concept of God, the word natural necessarily took on the meaning of abominable -- the whole of that fictitious world has its sources in hatred of the natural (-- the real! --), and is no more than evidence of a profound uneasiness in the presence of reality. . . . This explains everything. Who alone has any reason for lying his way out of reality? The man who suffers under it. But to suffer from reality one must be a botched reality. . . . The preponderance of pains over pleasures is the cause of this fictitious morality and religion: but such a preponderance also supplies the formula for decadence...

You look up when you wish to be exalted. And I look down because I am exalted.

You tell me: Life is hard to bear. But if it were otherwise why should you have your pride in the morning and your resignation in the evening?Life is hard to bear: but do not pretend to be so tender! We are all of us pretty fine asses and asseses of burden!

We are unknown to ourselves, we men of knowledge - and with good reason. We have never sought ourselves - how could it happen that we should ever find ourselves? It has rightly been said: Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also; our treasure is where the beehives of our knowledge are.

The advantage of a bad memory is that one enjoys several times the same good things for the first time.

Happiness: being able to forget or, to express in a more learned fashion.