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There are no facts, only interpretations.
from Nietzsche's Nachlass, A. Danto translation.
Enemies of truth.-- Convictions are more dangerous enemies
of truth than lies.
from
Nietzsche's Human, all too Human, s.483, R.J.
Hollingdale transl.
Linguistic danger to spiritual freedom.-- Every word is a
prejudice.
from Nietzsche's The Wanderer and his Shadow,s. 55,
R.J.
Hollingdale transl.
Man and things.-- Why does man not see things? He is
himself standing in the way: he conceals things.
from Nietzsche's Daybreak, s. 483, R.J. Hollingdale
transl
Just beyond experience!-- Even great spirits have only their
five fingers breadth of experience - just beyond it their
thinking ceases and their endless empty space and stupidity
begins.
from Nietzsche's Daybreak, s. 564, R.J. Hollingdale
transl
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 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.
We still do not know where the urge for truth comes from;
for as yet we have heard only of the obligation imposed by
society that it should exist: to be truthful means using the
customary metaphors - in moral terms, the obligation to lie
according to fixed convention, to lie herd-like in a style
obligatory for all...
'On truth
and lie in an extra-moral sense,' The Viking
Portable Nietzsche,
p.46-7, Walter Kaufmann transl.
Because we have for millenia made moral, aesthetic, religious
demands on the world, looked upon it with blind desire,
passion or fear, and abandoned ourselves to the bad habits of
illogical thinking, this world has gradually become so
marvelously variegated, frightful, meaningful, soulful, it has
acquired color - but we have been the colorists: it is the
human intellect that has made appearances appear and
transported its erroneous basic conceptions into things.
from Nietzsche's Human, all too Human, s.16, R.J.
Hollingdale transl.
We have arranged for ourselves a world in which we can live
- by positing bodies, lines, planes, causes and effects, motion
and rest, form and content; without these articles of faith
nobody could now endure life. But that does not prove them.
Life is no argument. The conditions of life might include
error.
from Nietzsche's The Gay Science, s.121, Walter Kaufmann
transl..
The reasons for which 'this' world has been characterized as
'apparent' are the very reasons which indicate its reality; any
other kind of reality is absolutely indemonstrable.
from Nietzsche's Twilight
of the Idols, ch.3, s.6, Walter
Kaufmann transl.
Metaphysical world.-- It is true, there could be a
metaphysical world; the absolute possibility of it is hardly to
be disputed. We behold all things through the human head
and cannot cut off this head; while the question nonetheless
remains what of the world would still be there if one had cut
it off.
from Nietzsche's Human, All Too Human, s.9, R.J.
Hollingdale transl.
Truth.-- No one now dies of fatal truths: there are too many
antidotes to them.
from
Nietzsche's Human, all too Human, s.516, R.J.
Hollingdale transl.
What are man's truths ultimately? Merely his irrefutable
errors.
from Nietzsche's The Gay Science, s.265, Walter Kaufmann
transl.
To renounce belief in one's ego, to deny one's own "reality"
-- what a triumph! not merely over the senses, over
appearance, but a much higher kind of triumph, a violation
and cruelty against reason -- a voluptious pleasure that
reaches its height when the ascetic self-contempt and
self-mockery of reason declares: "there is a realm of truth
and being, but reason is excluded from it!"
But precisely because we seek knowledge, let us not be
ungrateful to such resolute reversals of accustomed
perspectives and valuations with which the spirit has, with
apparent mischievousness and futility, raged against itself for
so long: to see differently in this way for once, to want to see
differently, is no small discipline and preparation for its
future "objectivity" -- the latter understood not as
"contemplation without interest" (which is a nonsensical
absurdity), but as the ability to control one's Pro and Con and
to dispose of them, so that one knows how to employ a
variety of perspectives and affective interpretations in the
service of knowledge.
Henceforth, my dear philosophers, let us be on guard against
the dangerous old conceptual fiction that posited a "pure,
will-less, painless, timeless knowing subject"; let us guard
against the snares of such contradictory concepts as "pure
reason," absolute spirituality," "knowledge in itself": these
always demand that we should think of an eye that is
completely unthinkable, an eye turned in no particular
direction, in which the active and interpreting forces, through
which alone seeing becomes seeing something, are supposed
to be lacking; these always demand of the eye an absurdity
and a nonsense. There is only a perspective seeing, only a
perspective "knowing"; and the more affects we allow to
speak about one thing, the more eyes, different eyes, we can
use to observe one thing, the more complete will our
"concept" of this thing, our "objectivity," be. But to eliminate
the will altogether, to suspend each and every affect,
supposing we were capable of this -- what would that mean
but to castrate the intellect?
from Nietzsche's Genealogy
of Morals, s III.12, Walter
Kaufmann transl.