Even by proving that a certain view is indispensable for living well, one proves merely that the view in question is a salutary myth: one does not prove it to be true.

God's reasons for communicating with man must be subsumed under his reason for communicating to him his account of his creation of the world - and man.

The emancipation of the scholars and scientists from philosophy is according to [Nietzsche] only a part of the democratic movement, i.e. of the emancipation of the low from subordination to the high. ... The plebeian character of the contemporary scholar or scientist is due to the fact that he has no reverence for himself.

The clarification of our political ideas insensibly changes into and becomes indistinguishable from the history of political ideas.

When speaking of a "body of knowledge" or of "the results of research," e.g., we tacitly assign the same cognitive status to inherited knowledge and to independently acquired knowledge. To counteract this tendency a special effort is required to transform inherited knowledge into genuine knowledge by revitalizing its original discovery, and to discriminate between the genuine and the spurious elements of what claims to be inherited knowledge.

Men must always have distinguished (e.g. in judicial matters) between hearsay and seeing with one's own eyes and have preferred what one has seen to what he has merely heard from others. But the use of this distinction was originally limited to particular or subordinate matters. As regards the most weighty matters the first things and the right way the only source of knowledge was hearsay.

Even by proving that a certain view is indispensable for living well, one proves merely that the view in question is a salutary myth: one does not prove it to be true.