Quotes About Truth

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?

Prejudice of the learned. – The learned judge correctly that people of all ages have believed they know what is good and evil, praise- and blameworthy. But it is a prejudice of the learned that we now know better than any other age.

in truth man is polluted river. one must be a sea to receive a polluted river without becoming defiled.

The pure soul is a pure lie. So long as the priest, that professional denier, calumniator and poisoner of life, is accepted as a higher variety of man, there can be no answer to the question, What is truth? Truth has already been stood on its head when the obvious attorney of mere emptiness is mistaken for its representative.

Or is it this: To feed on the acorns and grass of knowledge, and for the sake of truth to suffer hunger in one's soul?

Deception, flattering, lying, deluding, talking behind the back, putting up a false front, living in borrowed splendor, wearing a mask, hiding behind convention, playing a role for others and for oneself – in short, a continuous fluttering around the solitary flame of vanity – is so much the rule and the law among men that there is almost nothing which is less comprehensible than how an honest and pure drive for truth could have arisen among them.

The way after all – it does not exist!

Are the axioms of logic adequate to reality or are they a means and measure for us to create reality, the concept "reality", for ourselves?

Did he even grasp this himself, this cleverest of all self-outwitters? Did he tell himself this in the end, in the wisdom of his courage in the face of death? . . . Socrates wanted to die: not Athens, but he gave himself the poison cup, he forced Athens to give him the poison cup . . . "Socrates is no doctor," he said to himself softly, "death is the only doctor here . . . Socrates himself has just been sick for a long time.

Judgements, judgements of value concening life, for it or against it, can, in the end, never be true: they have value only as symptoms, they are worthy of consideration only as symptoms; in themselves such judgments are stupidities

TO RECOGNISE UNTRUTH AS A CONDITION OF LIFE; that is certainly to impugn the traditional ideas of value in a dangerous manner, and a philosophy which ventures to do so, has thereby alone placed itself beyond good and evil.

These wisest men of all ages should be scrutinized closely. Were they all perhaps shaky on their legs? Tottery? Decadent? Late? Could it be that wisdom appears on earth as a Raven, attracted by a little whiff of carrion?

There is no eternal justice.

Truth is a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, anthropomorphisms, in short, a sum of human relations which were poetically and rhetorically heightened, transferred, and adorned, and after long use seem solid, canonical, and binding to a nation. Truths are illusions about which it has been forgotten that they are illusions. from On Truth and Lying in an Extra-Moral Sense

Toate ideile despre Biseric? sunt recunoscute drept ceea ce sunt, cea mai rea ÅŸi fals? plat? din câte exist?, pentru a deprecia firea ÅŸi valorile fireÅŸti, însuÅŸi preotul e recunoscut drept ceea ce este, cea mai periculoas? spe?? de parazit, adev?ratul p?ianjen negru al vieÅ£ii...

synthetic judgments a priori should not be possible at all; we have no right to them; in our mouths they are nothing but false judgments.

Thereby men do not flee from being deceived as much as from being damaged by deception: what they hate at this stage is basically not the deception but the bad, hostile consequences of certain kinds of deceptions. In a similarly limited way man wants the truth: he desires the agreeable life-preserving consequences of truth, but he is indifferent to pure knowledge, which has no consequences; he is even hostile to possibly damaging and destructive truths.

We know that the destruction of an ideal does not necessarily produce a truth, but only one more piece of ignorance; it is the extension of our 'empty space,' an increase in our 'waste.

La cel ce vrea s? fie drept pân?-n adâncul sufletului chiar ÅŸi minciuna devine filantropie.

When I came to men, then found I them resting on an old infatuation: all of them thought they had long known what was good and bad for men.

We should call every truth false which was not accompanied by at least one laugh.

With regard to philosophical metaphysics, I always see increasing numbers who have attained to the negative goal, but as yet few who climb a few rungs backwards; one ought to look out, perhaps, over the last steps of the ladder, but not try to stand upon them.

People who comprehend a thing to its very depths rarely stay faithful to it forever. For they have brought its depths into the light of day: and in the depths there is always much that is unpleasant to see.