Quotes About Truth

The more abstract the truth you wish to teach, the more must you allure the senses to it.

First principle: any explanation is better than none. Because it is at bottom only a question of wanting to get rid of oppressive ideas, one is not exactly particular about what means one uses to get rid of them: the first idea which explains that the unknown is in fact the known does so much good that one 'holds it for true'. Proof by pleasure ('by potency') as criterion of truth.

Something might be true, even if it is also harmful and dangerous in the highest degree.

SUPPOSING that Truth is a woman—what then? Is there not ground for suspecting that all philosophers, in so far as they have been dogmatists, have failed to understand women—that the terrible seriousness and clumsy importunity with which they have usually paid their addresses to Truth, have been unskilled and unseemly methods for winning a woman?

Why does man not see things? He is himself standing in the way: he conceals things.

Socrate considérait que c'est un mal qui n'est pas loin de la folie, de s'imaginer que l'on possède une vertu, alors qu'on ne la possède pas. Certes, une pareille illusion est plus dangereuse que l'illusion contraire qui consiste à croire que l'on souffre d'un défaut, d'un vice. Deuxième Considération intempestive, ch. 6

It is still a metaphysical faith upon which our faith in science rests—that even we knowers of today, we godless anti-metaphysicians, still take our fire, too, from the flame lit by the thousand-year-old faith, the Christian faith which was also Plato's faith, that God is truth; that truth is divine.

As the will to truth thus gains self-consciousness ? there can be no doubt that morality will gradually perish: this is the great spectacle in a hundred acts reserved for the next two centuries in Europe ? the most terrible, most questionable, and perhaps also the most hopeful of spectacles.

Perhaps no one has yet been truthful enough about what 'truthfulness' is.

We are conducting an experiment with truth! Perhaps mankind will perish because of it! Fine!

Truth Requires Power — Truth in itself is no power at all, in spite of all that flattering rationalists are in the habit of saying to the contrary. Truth must either attract power to its side, or else side with power, for otherwise it will perish again and again. This has already been sufficiently demonstrated, and more than sufficiently!

We are primordially illogical and hence unjust beings and can recognise this fact: this is one of the greatest and most baffling discords of existence.

Lucrurile supreme trebuie s? aib? o alt? origine, una proprie lor, - ele nu ar putea lua naÅŸtere din aceast? lume efemer?, înÅŸel?toare, iluzorie ÅŸi mizer?, din aceast? harababur? de am?giri ÅŸi pofte!

For the indignant man, and he who perpetually tears and lacerates himself with his own teeth (or, in place of himself, the world, God, or society), may indeed, morally speaking, stand higher than the laughing and self-satisfied satyr, but in every other sense he is the more ordinary, more indifferent, and less instructive case. And no one is such a LIAR as the indignant man. 27.

No matter how strongly a thing may be believed, strength of belief is no criterion of truth.' But what is truth? Perhaps a kind of belief that has become a condition of life?

Nothing is beautiful, only people are beautiful: all aesthetics is based on this naïveté, this is its first truth. Let us immediately add its second: the only thing ugly is a degenerating person, - this defines the realm of aesthetic judgment.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Something might be true, even if it were 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. The strength of a person's spirit would then be measured by how much truth he could tolerate, or more precisely, to what extent he 'needs' to have it diluted, disguised, sweetened, muted, falsified.

where is the deceiver to be found?' – 'We've got it,' they cry in delight, 'it is the senses! These senses, which are so immoral as well, it is they which deceive us about the real world. Moral: escape from sense-deception, from becoming, from history, from falsehood – history is nothing but belief in the senses, belief in falsehood.

Reason' is the cause of our falsification of the evidence of the senses. In so far as the senses show becoming, passing away, change, they do not lie.… But Heraclitus will always be right in this, that being is an empty fiction. The 'apparent' world is the only one: the 'real' world has only been lyingly added…

El cinismo es la única forma en que las almas vulgares rozan lo que es honestidad;

Wouldn't thinking have put over on us the biggest hoax yet?

Friedrich Nietzsche

An einem Philosophen ist es eine Nichtswürdigkeit zu sagen »das Gute und das Schöne sind eins«; fügt er gar noch hinzu »auch das Wahre«, so soll man ihn prügeln. Die Wahrheit ist häßlich. Wir haben die Kunst, damit wir nicht an der Wahrheit zugrunde gehn.