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.

Most thinkers write badly, because they communicate not only their thoughts, but also the thinking of them.

If a man wishes to rid himself of a feeling of unbearable oppression, he may have to take hashish.

We hear only those questions for which we are in a position to find answers.

Against war one might say that it makes the victor stupid and the vanquished malicious. In its favor, that in producing these two effects it barbarizes, and so makes the combatants more natural. For culture it is a sleep or a wintertime, and man emerges from it stronger for good and for evil.

A Dionysian life task needs the hardness of the hammer and one of its first essentials is without doubt the joy to be found even in destruction.

i have never pondered over questions that are not questions.