Quotes About Truth

It is disgraceful for a philosopher to say: the good and the beautiful are one; if he adds 'also the true', one ought to beat him. Truth is ugly. We possess art lest we perish of the truth.

all life rests on appearance, art, illusion, optics, the need for perspective and for error...

I deny morality as I deny alchemy.

as though the Truth were such an innocent and incompetent creature as to require protectors!

I have done that', says my memory. I cannot have done that—says my pride and remains unshakeable. Finally—memory yields.

There are many kinds of eyes. Even the sphinx has eyes - and consequently there are many kinds of 'truths,' and consequently there is no truth

Life has not been devised by morality: it wants deception, it lives on deception.

whatever is profound loves masks; what is most profound even hates image and parable.

What has shaken me is not that you lied to me, but that I no longer believe you.

Everything straight lies,' murmured the dwarf disdainfully. 'All truth is crooked, time itself is a circle.

Light for some time to come will have to be called darkness.

Life no argument. - We have arranged for ourselves a world in which we can live - by positing bodies, lines, planes, causes and effects, motion and rest, form and content; without these articles of faith nobody now could endure life. But that does not prove them. Life is no argument. The conditions of life might include error.

But there is no such substratum; there is no being behind doing, effecting, becoming; the doer is merely a fiction added to the deed-the deed is everything.

Knowledge kills action, for action requires a state of being in which we are covered with the veil of illusion.

The tragedy is that we cannot believe the dogmas of religion and metaphysics if we have the strict methods of truth in heart and head, but on the other hand, we have become through the development of humanity so tenderly suffering that we need the highest kind of means of salvation and consolation: whence arises the danger that man may bleed to death through the truth that he realises.

Even a man who makes the most modest pretensions to integrity must know that a theologian, a priest, a pope of today not only errs when he speaks, but actually lies—and that he no longer escapes blame for his lie through "innocence" or "ignorance." The priest knows, as every one knows, that there is no longer any "God

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

good men never tell the truth. The good taught you false shores and false securities: you were born and kept in the lies of the good. Everything has been distorted and twisted down to its very bottom through the good

Terribleness is part of greatness: let us not deceive ourselves.

We possess art lest we perish of the truth.

I don't want to be mistaken for anyone?so I mustn't mistake myself.

It is good to express a matter in two ways simultaneously so as to give it both a right foot and a left. Truth can stand on one leg, to be sure; but with two it can walk and get about.

So long as the priest, that denier, calumniator and poisoner of life by profession, still counts as a higher kind of human being, there can be no answer to the question: what is truth? One has already stood truth on its head when the conscious advocate of denial and nothingness counts as the representative of 'truth

Ah, I cast indeed my net into their sea, and meant to catch good fish; but always did I draw up the head of some ancient God.