Quotes About Reality

138. We do the same when awake as when dreaming: we only invent and imagine him with whom we have intercourse—and forget it immediately.

All truth is simple... is that not doubly a lie?

What are man's truths ultimately? Merely his irrefutable errors.

Something might be true, even if it is also harmful and dangerous in the highest degree; indeed, it might be part of the essential nature of existence that to understand it completely would lead to our own destruction.

Is language the adequate expression of all realities?

How foolish it would be to suppose that one only needs to point out this origin and this misty shroud of delusion in order to destroy the world that counts for real, so-called 'reality.' We can destroy only as creators. -- But let us not forget this either: it is enough to create new names and estimations and probabilities in order to create in the long run new 'things.

Man permits himself to be lied to at night, his life long, when he dreams, and his moral sense never even tries to prevent this—although men have been said to have overcome snoring by sheer will power.

The lie of the ideal has till now been the curse on reality; on its account humanity itself has become fake and false right down to its deepest instincts - to the point of worshipping values opposite to the only ones which would guarantee it a flourishing, a future, the exaled right to a future.

Mathematics would certainly have not come into existence if one had known from the beginning that there was in nature no exactly straight line, no actual circle, no absolute magnitude.

Debemos guardarnos de la confusión en que por contiguity [contiguidad] psicológica, para decirlo igual que los ingleses, muy fácilmente cae un artista: la de creer que él mismo es aquello que él puede representar, concebir, expresar. En realidad ocurre que, si él lo fuera, no lo podría en absoluto representar, concebir, expresar.

These trumpeters of reality are bad musicians.

We have abolished the real world: what world is left? The apparent world perhaps? . . . But no! with the real world we have also abolished the apparent world.

The disappointed man speaks.—I sought great human beings, I never found anything but the apes of their ideal.

The world itself is a filthy monster.

Everything straight lieth," murmured the dwarf, contemptuously. "All truth is crooked; time itself is a circle.

I beg of you my brothers, remain true to the earth, believe not those who speak to you of otherworldly hopes! Poisoners are they.

Why might not the world WHICH CONCERNS US—be a fiction?

They all want to get to the throne: this is their madness—as if happiness were sitting on the throne! Often it is mud that sits on the throne—and often the throne also sits on mud.

What then in the last resort are the truths of mankind?--They are the irrefutable errors of mankind.

That the artist places a higher value on appearance than on reality constitutes no objection to this proposition. For 'appearance' here signifies reality once more, only selected, strengthened, corrected.… The tragic artist is not a pessimist – it is precisely he who affirms all that is questionable and terrible in existence, he is Dionysian…

There is not enough love and kindness in the world to permit us to give any of it away to imaginary beings.

Even the wisest among you is only a confusion and hybrid of plant and phantom. But do I ask you to become phantoms or plants?

The way after all – it does not exist!

If everything we project onto reality to make it intelligible were eliminated, ? no things remain but only dynamic quanta, in a relation of tension to all other dynamic quanta.