There are no facts, only interpretations.

from Nietzsche's Nachlass, A. Dantotranslation.

Enemies of truth.-- Convictions are moredangerous 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 hisShadow,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

Mystical explanations.--Mystical explanations are considered deep. Thetruth is that they are not even superficial.

from Nietzsche's The Gay Science, s.126,Walter Kaufmann transl.

Metaphysical world.-- It is true, there couldbe a metaphysical world; the absolute possibility of it is hardlyto be disputed. We behold all things through the human head andcannot cut off this head; while the question nonetheless remainswhat 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.

Just beyond experience!-- Even great spiritshave only their five fingers breadth of experience - justbeyond it their thinking ceases and their endless empty space andstupidity 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 humanrelations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellishedpoetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm,canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions aboutwhich one has forgotten that is what they are; metaphors which areworn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost theirpictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.We still do not know where the urge for truth comes from; for asyet we have heard only of the obligation imposed by society that itshould exist: to be truthful means using the customary metaphors -in moral terms, the obligation to lie according to fixedconvention, to lie herd-like in a style obligatory for all...

'On truth and lie in an extra-moral sense,' TheViking Portable Nietzsche, p.46-7, Walter Kaufmann 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 hisirrefutable errors.

from Nietzsche's The Gay Science, s.265,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 ofillogical thinking, this world has gradually become somarvelously variegated, frightful, meaningful, soulful, it hasacquired color - but we have been the colorists: it is the humanintellect that has made appearances appear and transported itserroneous basic conceptions into things.

from Nietzsche's Human, all too Human, s.16,R.J. Hollingdale transl.

The reasons for which 'this' world has beencharacterized as 'apparent' are the very reasons which indicate itsreality; any other kind of reality is absolutelyindemonstrable.

from Nietzsche's Twilight of the Idols, ch.3,s.6, Walter Kaufmann transl.

The total character of the world, however, is in alleternity chaos--in the sense not of a lack of necessity but a lackof order, arrangement, form, beauty, wisdom, and whatever namesthere are for our aesthetic anthropomorphisms...Let us beware ofattributing to it heartlessness and unreason or their opposites: itis neither perfect nor beautiful, nor noble, nor does it wish tobecome any of these things; it does not by any means strive toimitate man... Let us beware of saying that there are laws innature. There are only necessities: there is nobody who commands,nobody who obeys, nobody who trespasses... But when will we ever bedone with our caution and care? When will all these shadows of Godcease to darken our minds? When will we complete our de-deificationof nature? When may we begin to "naturalize" humanity interms of a pure, newly discovered, newly redeemed nature?

from Nietzsche's The Gay Science, s.109,Walter Kaufmann transl..

We have arranged for ourselves a world in which wecan live - by positing bodies, lines, planes, causes and effects,motion and rest, form and content; without these articles of faithnobody could now endure life. But that does not prove them. Life isno argument. The conditions of life might include error.

from Nietzsche's The Gay Science, s.121,Walter Kaufmann transl..

Over immense periods of time the intellect producednothing but errors. A few of these proved to be useful and helpedto preserve the species: those who hit upon or inherited these hadbetter luck in their struggle for themselves and their progeny.Such erroneous articles of faith... include the following: thatthere are things, substances, bodies; that a thing is what itappears to be; that our will is free; that what is good for me isalso good in itself.

from Nietzsche's The Gay Science, s.110,Walter Kaufmann transl..

Origin of the logical.-- How did logic comeinto existence in man's head? Certainly out of illogic, whose realmoriginally must have been immense. Innumerable beings who madeinferences in a way different from ours perished; for all that,their ways might have been truer. Those, for example, who did notknow how to find often enough what is "equal" as regards bothnourishment and hostile animals--those, in other words, whosubsumed things too slowly and cautiously--were favored with alesser probability of survival than those who guessed immediatelyupon encountering similar instances that they must be equal. Thedominant tendency, however, to treat as equal what is merelysimilar--an illogical tendency, for nothing is really equal--iswhat first created any basis for logic.

In order that the concept of substance couldoriginate--which is indispensible for logic although in thestrictest sense nothing real corresponds to it--it was likewisenecessary that for a long time one did not see or perceive thechanges in things. The beings that did not see so precisely had anadvantage over those who saw everything "in flux." At bottom, everyhigh degree of caution in making inferences and every skepticaltendency constitute a great danger for life. No living beings wouldhave survived if the opposite tendency--to affirm rather thansuspend judgement, to err and make up things rather thanwait, to assent rather than negate, to pass judgement rather thanbe just-- had not been bred to the point where it becameextraordinarily strong.

from Nietzsche's The Gay Science, s.111,Walter Kaufmann transl..

Cause and effect: such a duality probably neverexists; in truth we are confronted by a continuum out of which weisolate a couple of pieces, just as we perceive motion only asisolated points and then infer it without ever actually seeing it.The suddenness with which many effects stand out misleads us;actually, it is sudden only for us. In this moment of suddennessthere are an infinite number of processes which elude us. Anintellect that could see cause and effect as a continuum and a fluxand not, as we do, in terms of an arbitrary division anddismemberment, would repudiate the concept of cause and effect anddeny all conditionality.

from Nietzsche's The Gay Science, s.112,Walter Kaufmann transl..

To renounce belief in one's ego, to deny one's own"reality" -- what a triumph! not merely over the senses, overappearance, but a much higher kind of triumph, a violation andcruelty against reason -- a voluptuous pleasure that reachesits height when the ascetic self-contempt and self-mockery ofreason declares: "there is a realm of truth and being, butreason is excluded from it!"But precisely because we seek knowledge, let us not be ungratefulto such resolute reversals of accustomed perspectives andvaluations with which the spirit has, with apparent mischievousnessand futility, raged against itself for so long: to see differentlyin this way for once, to want to see differently, is nosmall discipline and preparation for its future "objectivity" --the latter understood not as "contemplation without interest"(which is a nonsensical absurdity), but as the ability tocontrol one's Pro and Con and to dispose of them, so that oneknows how to employ a variety of perspectives and affectiveinterpretations in the service of knowledge.Henceforth, my dear philosophers, let us be on guard against thedangerous old conceptual fiction that posited a "pure, will-less,painless, timeless knowing subject"; let us guard against thesnares of such contradictory concepts as "pure reason," absolutespirituality," "knowledge in itself": these always demand that weshould think of an eye that is completely unthinkable, an eyeturned in no particular direction, in which the active andinterpreting forces, through which alone seeing becomes seeingsomething, are supposed to be lacking; these always demandof the eye an absurdity and a nonsense. There is only aperspective seeing, only a perspective "knowing"; and themore affects we allow to speak about one thing, themore 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 suspendeach and every affect, supposing we were capable of this -- whatwould that mean but to castrate the intellect?

from Nietzsche's The Genealogy of Morals, sIII.12, Walter Kaufmann transl.

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Nietzsche Quotes: Truth and Knowledge