Friedrich Nietzsche - Truth Quotes

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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
Whereas the man of action binds his life to reason and its concepts so that he will not be swept away and lost, the scientific investigator builds his hut right next to the tower of science so that he will be able to work on it and to find shelter for himself beneath those bulwarks which presently exist. And he requires shelter, for there are frightful powers which continuously break in upon him, powers which oppose scientific "truth" with completely different kinds of "truths" which bear on their shields the most varied sorts of emblems.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Age and truth. Young people love what is interesting and odd, no matter how true or false it is. More mature minds love what is interesting and odd about truth. Fully mature intellects, finally, love truth, even when it appears plain and simple, boring to the ordinary person; for they have noticed that truth tends to reveal its highest wisdom in the guise of simplicity.

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
The very word "Christianity" is a misunderstanding — in truth, there was only one Christian, and he died on the cross.

Friedrich Nietzsche
Ten truths must you find during the day; otherwise will you seek truth during the night, and your soul will have been hungry.

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

Friedrich Nietzsche
Are designations congruent with things? Is language the adequate expression of all realities?
It is only by means of forgetfulness that man can ever reach the point of fancying himself to possess a "truth" of the grade just indicated. If he will not be satisfied with truth in the form of tautology, that is to say, if he will not be content with empty husks, then he will always exchange truths for illusions.

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

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
Silence is worse; all truths that are kept silent become poisonous.

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

Friedrich Nietzsche
When someone hides something behind a bush and looks for it again in the same place and finds it there as well, there is not much to praise in such seeking and finding. Yet this is how matters stand regarding seeking and finding "truth" within the realm of reason. If I make up the definition of a mammal, and then, after inspecting a camel, declare "look, a mammal' I have indeed brought a truth to light in this way, but it is a truth of limited value. That is to say, it is a thoroughly anthropomorphic truth which contains not a single point which would be "true in itself" or really and universally valid apart from man. At bottom, what the investigator of such truths is seeking is only the metamorphosis of the world into man.

Friedrich Nietzsche
In the knowledge of truth, what really matters is the possession of it, not the impulse under which it was sought.

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

Friedrich Nietzsche
Lessing, the most honest of theoretical men, dared to say that he took greater delight in the quest for truth than in the truth itself.

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

Friedrich Nietzsche
All credibility, all good conscience, all evidence of truth come only from the senses.

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

Friedrich Nietzsche
What if God were not exactly truth, and if this could be proved? And if he were instead the vanity, the desire for power, the ambitions, the fear, and the enraptured and terrified folly of mankind?

Friedrich Nietzsche
There is nothing more necessary than truth, and in comparison with it everything else has only secondary value. This absolute will to truth: what is it? Is it the will to not allow ourselves to be deceived? Is it the will not to deceive? One does not want to be deceived, under the supposition that it is injurious, dangerous, or fatal to be deceived.

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

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
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