Christianity remains to this day the greatest misfortune of humanity.
Friedrich NietzscheRead
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. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions — they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Truth is subjective and shaped by human experiences and language.
Friedrich Nietzsche's quote challenges the notion of absolute truth, suggesting that what we consider to be truth is actually a collection of metaphors and illusions created by human thought and language over time. He argues that these truths, which are often taken as definitive or binding, are actually fluid concepts that have lost their original vibrancy and meaning through repetition and societal acceptance.
Themes
TruthMetaphorIllusionPerceptionReality
In practice
Example use cases
In a philosophy class discussion on the nature of reality.
More from Friedrich Nietzsche
All quotes →That which does not kill us makes us stronger.
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Hope in reality is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man.
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Watch them clamber, these swift monkeys! They clamber over one another and thus drag one another into the mud and the depth. They all want to get to the throne: that is their madness — as if happiness sat on the throne. Often, mud sits on the throne — and often the throne also on mud. Mad they all appear to me, clambering monkeys and overardent. Foul smells their idol, the cold monster: foul, they smell to me altogether, these idolators.
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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.
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The anarchist and the Christian have a common origin.
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