Truth

There are no eternal facts as there are no absolute truths.

Necessity is not an established fact but an interpretation.

They are now informing me that not only are they better than the powerful, the masters of the world whose spittle they have to lick (not from fear, not at all from fear! but because God orders them to honour those in authority) – not only are they better, but they have a “better time”, or at least will have a better time one day. But enough! enough! I can’t bear it any longer. Bad air! Bad air! This workshop where ideals are fabricated – it seems to me just to stink of lies.

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

A great truth wants to be criticized not idolized

You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.

All things are subject to interpretation. Whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.

Every word is a prejudice.

We possess art lest we perish of the truth.

We have art in order not to die of the 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.

Einer hat immer Unrecht: aber mit zweien beginnt die Wahrheit. Einer kann sich nicht beweisen: aber zweie kann man bereits nicht widerlegen.

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

...inability to lie is still far from being love to truth. Be on your guard! ... He who cannot lie, doth not know what truth is.

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

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

No one dies of fatal truths nowadays: there are too many antidotes.

What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms – in short, a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.

Convictions are more dangerous foes of truth than lies.

Belief means not wanting to know what is true.

A thinker sees his own actions as experiments and questions--as attempts to find out something. Success and failure are for him answers above all.

All modern philosophizing is political, policed by governments, churches, academics, custom, fashion, and human cowardice, all off which limit it to a fake learnedness.

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.

Those who know that they are profound strive for clarity. Those who would like to seem profound to the crowd strive for obscurity. For the crowd believes that if it cannot see to the bottom of something it must be profound. It is so timid and dislikes going into the water.