Friedrich Nietzsche - Truth Quotes

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In the consciousness of the truth he has perceived, man now sees everywhere only the awfulness or the absurdity of existence,... and loathing seizes him.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Truth is the kind of error without which a certain species of life could not live. The value for life is ultimately decisive.

Friedrich Nietzsche
It is not when truth is dirty, but when it is shallow, that the lover of knowledge is reluctant to step into its waters.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Here the ways of men part: if you wish to strive for peace of soul and pleasure, then believe; if you wish to be a devotee of truth, then inquire.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Do I still have to add that in the entire New Testament there is only one solitary figure one is obliged to respect? Pilate, the Roman governor. To take a Jewish affair seriously — he cannot persuade himself to do that. One Jew more or less — what does it matter?... The noble scorn of a Roman before whom an impudent misuse of the word 'truth' was carried on has enriched the New Testament with the only expression which possesses value — which is its criticism, its annihilation even: 'What is truth?...

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

Friedrich Nietzsche
What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding.

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

Friedrich Nietzsche
I am opposed to socialism because it dreams ingenuously of good, truth, beauty, and equal rights.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Truth as Circe. - Error has transformed animals into men; is truth perhaps capable of changing man back into an animal?

Friedrich Nietzsche
It is so little true that martyrs offer any support to the truth of a cause that I am inclined to deny that any martyr has ever had anything to do with the truth at all.

Friedrich Nietzsche
All religions bear traces of the fact that they arose during the intellectual immaturity of the human race - before it had learned the obligations to speak the truth. Not one of them makes it the duty of its god to be truthful and understandable in his communications.

Friedrich Nietzsche
And we should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once. And we should call every truth false which was not accompanied by at least one laugh.

Friedrich Nietzsche
At every step one has to wrestle for truth; one has to surrender for it almost everything to which the heart, to which our love, our trust in life, cling otherwise. That requires greatness of soul: the service of truth is the hardest service. What does it mean, after all, to have integrity in matters of the spirit? That one is severe against one's heart...that one makes of every Yes and No a matter of conscience.

Friedrich Nietzsche
As though "the Truth" were such an innocent and incompetent creature as to require protectors!

Friedrich Nietzsche
Art is not merely an imitation of the reality of nature, but in truth a metaphysical supplement to the reality of nature, placed alongside thereof for its conquest.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Enemies of truth. Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Every fact and every work exercises a fresh persuasion over every age and every new species of man. History always enunciates new truths.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Words are but symbols for the relations of things to one another and to us; nowhere do they touch upon absolute truth.

Friedrich Nietzsche
The more abstract the truth you wish to teach, the more you need to seduce the senses to it.

Friedrich Nietzsche
How much truth can a spirit bear, how much truth can a spirit dare?... that became for me more and more the real measure of value.

Friedrich Nietzsche
To what extent can truth endure incorporation? That is the question; that is the experiment.

Friedrich Nietzsche
A profession which seeks the truth must consider whether silence about motives and restraint in expression serve, on balance, to enhance or suppress it.

Friedrich Nietzsche
You shall not steal! You shall not kill! Such words were once called holy; before them people bowrd their knees and heads, and removed their shoes. But I ask you: where have there ever been better thieves and killers in the world than such holy words have been? Is there not in all of life itself - robbing and killing? And when such words were called holy, was not truth itself thereby - killed?

Friedrich Nietzsche
Whatever a theologian regards as true must be false: there you have almost a criterion of truth.

Friedrich Nietzsche
It is good to express a thing twice right at the outset and so to give it a right foot and also a left foot. Truth can surely stand on one leg, but with two, it will be able to walk and get around.

Friedrich Nietzsche
The love of truth has its reward in heaven and even on earth.

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

Friedrich Nietzsche
The venerability, reliability, and utility of truth is something which a person demonstrates for himself from the contrast with the liar, whom no one trusts and everyone excludes. As a "rational" being, he now places his behavior under the control of abstractions. He will no longer tolerate being carried away by sudden impressions, by intuitions.

Friedrich Nietzsche
It is terrible to die of thirst in the ocean. Do you have to salt your truth so heavily that it does not even-quench thirst any more?

Friedrich Nietzsche